Week three... hits and miss

As you can imagine there are a number of things that Anna and I want to achieve whilst on this adventure. This week's update is a tale of hits and a miss, but I don't think we should be too hard on ourselves regarding the miss, when it involved a life or death situation... (this may be an exaggeration 🙄)

As mentioned in the previous update, I have got into the habit of meeting Anna at the end of the day for a walk along the river, which has been great for both of us. It means that I get to speak to someone (😆) and Anna gets to download her day and switch into evening mode. During one of these walks I asked Anna how her day was and the answer, for just the one day, involved the following countries: Ukraine, Fiji, Latvia, Mali, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Absolute hit! One thing that Anna wants to achieve is to broaden her perspective and make a difference on a bigger stage. I think we can safely say that she is off to a good start!

We started our week with a walk from the suburbs up into the Vienna woods and through the vineyards in between. This gave us our first taste of proper warm weather and also the opportunity to enjoy some of Vienna's key offerings:

The availability of affordable Turkish cuisine - I suspect the Viennese would not have this high on their list of "key offerings" but it was a national holiday and the only place we could find to get food was a little kebab shack that I am becoming very fond of. Fantastic falafel sandwiches and baklava that would likely bring on a heart attack if you ate more than one, and therefore completely genuine!

The availability of wine direct from/in the vineyard - we walked through several vineyards, some of which were selling their wares from a shack - given that it was hot and there was still some way to go we stuck to the spritzers, which were very tasty indeed. And the broader concept of sitting in a vineyard with a bottle of Grüner Veltliner was banked for future deployment!

"Shacks" were important to this lovely walk! Another hit in the bag. And so to the shameful miss...

We said to ourselves, that if we're going to do this, we should do it properly and try to avoid living a double life with too many ties back to the UK (other than lovely family and friends of course). But three weeks in and we're successfully searching out marmite and cheddar! (This is the "life and death" bit by the way...). Poor form, but until we find a sufficiently good replacement for cheddar, I think it's going to stay. And marmite is like a "main food group" to me and I saw some through a shop window and couldn't resist... "What shop?" I hear you all cry; why an Asian mini-market of course! (The COVID testing kits in the photo are incidental by the way).

Micro-news:

• Apartment hunting is well underway and taking up lots of time

• Our various wanderings associated with apartment hunting led us to Cumberland Road, Paradise Road and Utopia Way!

• The public transport system is every bit as good as people say, indeed probably better.