Vienna, One Day at a Time

 Today is Day Five in Vienna. My mind is processing a new reality where most of the language circulating around me is unintelligible. My senses are processing a new reality where the landscape and architecture are wholly unfamiliar. And my body is processing a new reality where it is sore and aching from walking, climbing, more walking, and more climbing in a nonstop pursuit to go everywhere and see everything.

 I’m calling a halt. We just can’t do it all, even in a month. The goal of this program, The Good Life Abroad, is to live like a local. I’m a local in Houston. I do not cram every moment with things to do and places to be. Sometimes I just veg out, laze around, read a book. Don’t you?

 The TV hasn’t been turned on since we got here. Programming is in German and our three months of German tutoring didn’t give us the foundation to get much out of German language TV. It has helped with person-to-person interactions, but not as much as you’d think.

 When I asked one young woman in a shop if she spoke English, she looked at me like I’d lost my mind and said, “Of course.” It seems that people start English language lessons in primary school. Imagine that. The people who we’ve had a harder time communicating with are older Austrians and ones who seem to be from other countries themselves.

 Google Translate is a handy app and it helps. Rummaging around in our recently acquired German vocabulary turns up odd tidbits that unlock puzzles, too. And it’s comforting to be in our travel group from time to time and have the buzz of English going on around us.

 The group has regular gatherings every week. Tuesday is a group lunch and Thursday is a group happy hour. Our hosts cover the costs of those. They also offer us one or two local excursions each week. Today we went to the Schönbrunn Gardens for a stroll, where we saw the incomparable Neptune Fountain. Afterward, we had a tour (that we paid for) of the Schönbrunn Palace.

 I have quite a few lovely photos, but I am incapable in my present state of exhaustion of showing them to you. Looking up the palace and fountain on the internet would be fascinating and worthwhile.

 I can’t give you actual mileage of how much walking and stair climbing our day involved, but you’ll get the idea from this blow-by-blow. From our apartment, we walked three blocks to the tram stop, caught our tram and off we went. At the tram station, we disembarked and walked a ways to an underground train station where we hopped on for a short ride.

 When we got off, we hiked to another station to get on a different underground train for a lengthy ride to our destination. After climbing a long flight of steps up from the train, we found ourselves at a vast parking lot full of tour buses. Off in the distance were the grounds of the Schönbrunn Palace. (Ok, maybe they weren’t that far, but it seemed like it.)  The grounds encompass over 400 acres.

 We walked in through the main gate and around the huge palace complex to the gardens, then across an enormous expanse of shrubbery, gardens, and lawn to the Neptune Fountain. After that, we walked all the way back around to the front of the building, then to the wing on the opposite side. That took us to the beginning of the tour, which wound through the first floor of that wing, up a very long flight of stairs, and around the Emperor’s family quarters on the second floor. Even the gift shop at the end was a warren of six rooms!

 To say we were exhausted is such an understatement. We left our building at 9:30 am. It was 1:30 pm by the time we finished the tour. We still had to find lunch and start the long trek back home. We did finally get back to our apartment around 4:00 pm, barely functional.  And, you know, we had to go out again if we wanted to eat dinner.

 I am not complaining, exactly. I’m just recognizing that we have to get a lot more realistic about what two people who are closer to 80 than they are to 70 can do in a day. We need some quieter days and the realization that this is not a competition to see who can do the most in 30 days. I’m looking for a lot more balance, literally and figuratively!

 When have you tried to do way too much and paid for it with aching knees and hips?

Auf Wiedersehen

Monkey Businessing my Money

 Trying to settle details for our trip to Vienna, coming up in just two weeks, has humbled me and taught me how puny mere humans are in the face of organizational red tape and computer system controls. It’s not that I haven’t experienced this before, but that I haven’t had so many balls to juggle at once while facing obstacle after obstacle.

 Number one problem when spending time in a friendly foreign country is how to reasonably access money. First, it’s an entirely different monetary system with its own currency that doesn’t have the same value as American money.

 Second, they have a banking system of their own which doesn’t always play nice with ours. Whether one’s debit card will work in a European ATM is questionable. At the very least, one has to ask that question about every debit card.

 In our case, our debit card would probably work, but we’d have to pay the European ATM’s fees ourselves and also pay a 3% foreign exchange fee on every transaction. The fees would add up to a lot over a month-long visit. We decided to investigate the universe of debit cards.

  I used Copilot, my favorite research associate. After reviewing a lot of material—this AI program does overkill on the data dumps IMHO—it seemed that Fidelity Investments had the best debit card for foreign travel. No ATM fees, they cover the foreign bank’s ATM fees, and they don’t charge foreign transaction fees.

  Armed with that information, I went online to open an account and get my debit card. The first snag I hit shouldn’t have surprised me. This wasn’t a Fintech* company: They wanted me to open a regular account before I asked for a debit card. So I did. I transferred a third of the considerable spending money we had set aside to cover all the costs of living in Vienna for a month, feeding ourselves, traveling, buying tickets for things, etc.

 Then I tried to apply for a debit card. Nope. Money had to clear. I’m okay with that. I had transferred cash from my bank, so how long could that take? The next day, the bank told me the money cleared, but Fidelity still wouldn’t let me even apply for the danged card. I called the customer service line and discovered that the money had to “settle” before I could apply.

 What is settling? Even after a lot of rigmarole, I don’t know. Closest I can come is they want to know you’re going to be hanging around for 7–10 days before they trust you with their application process. Bottom line, I could apply for the debit card on October 3.

 Okay, that’s still 10 days before our trip; however, it takes 7–10 business days to get the card after one applies. That puts us well into our departure date of October 14. Gee, what if the USPS has a hiccup and doesn’t deliver on time? So I asked if they could expedite mailing the card. I even offered to pay for the extra cost.

 The agent gave me a wishy-washy maybe and said I could ask again on October 3 when I applied for the card. Oh, no! That’s not going to happen. They have my cash and I can’t get it. I’m highly annoyed and totally stymied, so Monday morning, I did the next best thing. I got in my car and drove to a Fidelity office near me.

Honestly, Deonte—the young man who helped me—couldn’t have been nicer or more patient. He got his coworker in the ‘back office’ on the line and between the two of them, they came up with what we all hope is a solution: a wire transfer. Turns out that money deposited by wire transfer is available for use more quickly than other methods.

 All I had to do was drive to my bank and wire them more of my money with the expectation—but not a guarantee—that I will be able to access it before I leave the country. Oh, and pay my bank $33 for the privilege of doing a wire transfer. Who knew they cost that much! The fine folks at Fidelity also took a paper debit card application that would be submitted the moment settling happened.

 Perhaps we will cross the Rubicon soon. I have done everything as instructed. The bank completed the transfer. Thankfully, I reviewed their documents before they transmitted them and caught the typo in my Fidelity account number (bullet dodged!) All that’s left is to wait for the new deposit to settle and then see when our cards might be processed and mailed.

 Honestly, my gut has been in a knot over this since last week. Three weeks seemed like a reasonable amount of lead time to get the money stuff lined up, but was clearly not. To any would-be travelers, forewarned is forearmed!!

 Fidelity now has a substantial amount of our Vienna reserves. Here’s hoping we can actually use it when we get there.

 Have you ever been caught in this kind of catch-22? How did you resolve it?

 Ciao

 *Fintech is Financial Technology and includes companies like Chime, PayPal, Square, etc. that do monkey business —oops, I meant money business—online.

Red-Letter Day!

 All the way back to the Roman Empire, special days have been designated on calendars and historical documents with red ink. Standing out against the black letters of normal activities, especially on liturgical calendars, people recognized red-letter days at a glance.

 Today is a red-letter day at my house: In exactly one month, Michael and I will depart for Vienna, Austria, where we will live in an apartment in the 17^th district, Hernals, for four weeks!

 This is our trip of a lifetime to celebrate our upcoming 50^th wedding anniversary. Fifty years ago, during a surprise wedding at the Buel Street Pub in St. Louis’s Soulard neighborhood (that’s another blog), we couldn’t have imagined this opportunity.

 Truly, I don’t think we ever imagined that this “someday” fifty years hence would actually materialize, despite our love for one another. Both divorced and unwilling to have that happen again, we made a private wedding vow: Homicide, suicide, or natural causes, the only way out is a pine box. Many joys have blessed us and many pitfalls have befallen us over the decades, but we persevered and here we are, both above ground.

 You might wonder how we chose a month in Vienna. That’s easy: ballet! For several years, Michael and I dreamed about a dance tour of Europe, but we never could find one. We tried to devise a tour of our own, but the logistics are very complicated and we never nailed a trip down.

 After a dance talk sponsored by the Houston Ballet last year, I asked visiting choreographer Reed Anderson Graph of the Stuttgart Ballet which were the best companies in Europe. He named several, but Vienna’s, Prague’s, and, of course, Stuttgart’s stood out. Just a few weeks later, I stumbled across an online ad for The Good Life Abroad.

 This travel company arranges extended stays in European cities for groups of people, provides them with private apartments, and adds in a Community Manager. There are a few group activities included, like a weekly lunch, a weekly excursion, and a weekly happy hour, but other than that one lives like a local. What a fabulous opportunity!

 Our anniversary is in December, but we didn’t want go when the only performances on offer were different versions of the Nutcracker! Fall is the opening of dance season in the States, so we opted for the October-November window.

 We already have tickets to the Vienna State Ballet and have arranged a weekend trip to Prague with a performance at the Czech National Ballet. Sadly, the Stuttgart Ballet doesn’t sync with our calendar, but we may find some other opportunities after we get settled.

 Our Vienna neighborhood is a mix of 19^th-century buildings, villas, forested hills, and quiet residential streets. Our particular building looks pretty modern on Google Earth. It wraps around an ample green space, apparently typical of Vienna, and seems to be in a dense, mixed-use area. There’s an Apotheke (pharmacy) just across the street.

 We’ve been preparing. In July we started taking German classes. That’s gone fairly well, but it is a relief to know that many people in Austria sprechen English. We are supposed to be able to walk two miles on uneven surfaces (read cobblestones) and climb two flights of stairs before the trip—we’re getting there.

 There’ll be more about our trip as it draws closer, but for our RED-LETTER DAY this is enough.

 It’s the season for stuff to start happening! What red-letter days have you had recently or are you anticipating?

 Tschüβ

(tschuss = ciao in German)

The Long Love

 I’ve talked a little bit here and there about our fall trip to Vienna, Austria, but as of last Tuesday, the trip is real: we bought our airline tickets! The airplane takes off in four months, but I’m already floating on air.

 It seems incredible that we will live in Vienna for four weeks; perhaps what I should really be amazed by is that Michael and I will celebrate 50 years of marriage this year. Most people will agree that marriage isn’t easy. Even when the love is true and deep, the realities of daily life can be erosive.

Bad things happen to people, and when you share a life with another person, there are more opportunities for bad things to happen. Add in a couple of children and the bad-things-happen index seems to rise exponentially. Some of the bad things are manageable—job loss, broken limbs, non-fatal car accidents—but we’ve had some bad luck that practically sucked the marrow out of our bones.

 I’d have to say my illness, which was finally diagnosed as lupus in 1989, was the gigantic bad thing for us. It forced me out of my career in telecommunications, which I happened to love, and which also provided our family’s insurance and lifestyle support. Michael had to take on complete responsibility for supporting us, which would have been enough of a burden in a society where you need two working people to get ahead. But because I was often incapacitated, he also had to run the household, manage the children, and take care of me.

 Wow. Sometimes it surprises me that he didn’t bolt. We both had had short, bad first marriages and neither of us wanted a repeat divorce. When we married, we made this vow: Homicide, suicide, or natural causes, the only way out is a pine box. Later we added: If you leave, you have to take the children.

 Do I think our vow is what made Michael hang in there when times were so difficult for us that we had to downsize our house and tighten our belts considerably? Probably not. I think he just loved me that much. (But when I browbeat him into adopting a toddler with me a few years later, the vow definitely was in play.)

 All the children survived and thrived, each in their own way. A decade or so ago, Michael had cancer—two different times, two different kinds—and I took care of him. It balances out if you hang in long enough. I’ve read recently about the phenomenon of gray divorce: old people leaving long marriages. I hear that Covid caused a lot of the trouble because couples, forced to spend so much time together, found out how unhappy they were.

 We are blessed in that regard. We enjoy many of the same things, like ballet and theater and art, and we find the same things funny. We like to spend time together, but we’re not joined at the hip. We support each other’s interests and hobbies. Maybe it’s not so surprising that our marriage is in its 50^th year.

 Early in our dating relationship, a strange thing happened. Michael was riding in the car with me, cracking jokes and fiddling with my radio station—major no-no, people—and I blurted out a sentence that I couldn’t explain then and I can’t explain now. I said, “I can’t believe I married such a turkey.”

 Boy, was that a conversation stopper. I had known him less than a month. I couldn’t believe I said it and, as he reported when we finally discussed it years later, he couldn’t either. Neither one of us acknowledged what I said. I gripped the steering wheel and drove. He made a comment along the lines of “How about them Cardinals?” (We lived in St. Louis back then.) The tension faded, but, thankfully, the relationship did not.

 Sometimes we say that we’ve been together over the centuries, sharing past lives. We are so simpatico that it feels like we’ve put in a lot of time learning how to balance in a marriage. Metaphysical, I know, but why not? I’m happy to think that we’ll find each other again in some distant time and place. Maybe we’ll get another 50 years out of it!

 Who’s in your life that you would like to be reincarnated with?

Dancing in Vienna

 We’re going to the ballet! “So what?” you ask. “You go to the ballet all the time.” Here’s so what—this time we’re going to the ballet in Vienna, Austria. A few hours ago I purchased tickets to the Vienna State Ballet for Michael and me on October 27. I am over the moon.

 I haven’t mentioned the trip to Vienna since last October, when we booked it, but now it’s less than six months away and it is becoming more real than fantasy. The trip is one of many offered by The Good Life Abroad (TGLA). They provide comfortable apartments in European cities to cohorts of participants for one month stays. Each city has a coordinator who arranges a few activities each week, but people are mostly on their own.

 The reason for this astonishing trip is our upcoming 50^th wedding anniversary. We toyed with many ideas about how to celebrate. Some of them included our kids and grandkids—reunion at a resort, cruise, destination vacation—but we ultimately decided that what we truly wanted was a world class experience for ourselves. Sorry kids!

 We wanted to go to Prague—a beautiful city with an acclaimed ballet. (Our celebration had to be ballet-centric because that’s who we are.) Even though it was a whole year away, we discovered that October 2026 had already sold out. Suddenly it felt imperative to book our trip without delay. Vienna was our second choice, and we jumped on it immediately. Michael and I grinned at each other as I clicked to confirm. And yes—we still have side trips to ballet hotspots Prague and Stuttgart firmly in our sights.

 We couldn’t actually buy tickets at any of these venues at the time, though. None of them would release their fall offerings until spring. Research had told me that tickets sold out early and I had no idea how one bought a ticket to a performance on another continent in another language and another currency anyway. I’ve been stay-up-at-night worried about the ballet tickets since last October.

 I did alleviate a little anxiety by putting Copilot to work monitoring the season announcements for all three companies. Last week, it alerted me that Vienna would open fall ticket sales today. How, I asked, do I buy these tickets? It told me I could buy tickets online if I opened an account on the Vienna State Opera website. Oh, and here’s a tip: select English language and the whole process translates automatically.

 The whole process turned out to be so easy that I’m embarrassed by my months of fretting. Chalk one up for modern technology. Prague and Stuttgart still haven’t announced their fall performances, so we got our Vienna tickets for a weeknight to keep weekends open. We hope to see dancers in the other cities, too. Copilot is monitoring announcements for me.

 There’s more to our trip than ballet, of course. Vienna is so rich in history, architecture, music, and literature that I think we’ll risk exhaustion if we aren’t careful with our time. And TGLA provides enrichment through their city coordinator program.

 Every Tuesday, there will be a group lunch. Believe it or not, we’ve been promised schnitzel in a Michelin-starred restaurant! Every Wednesday, there will be a group excursion. Every Thursday, there will be a group happy hour. All of these events are included in our trip fees. We can skip things, of course, but it’s hard to imagine why we would want to.

 The rest of the time, we fend for ourselves and, I’ll admit, this is a little bit daunting. I’ve been playing around on Duolingo, but I definitely don’t speak German. This worries me, although our German friend Bruno tells us that English is widely spoken in Europe—it’s a school requirement from a young age—so we probably won’t starve or get too lost. I hope.

 Planning this trip reminds me how rarely we let our imaginations go wild. And how much joy there is in it. What is your dream destination? Who would you go with? How long would you stay? Remember, it’s a dream, so no limits!!

Ciao