I think somebody has died in my building. When we unload the stroller, we’ve been smelling an oddly human waste-ish odor—subtle but evident—emanating from the only apartment in the entryway to our building. We’ve seen no activity, and the ads that get stuck in the door haven’t moved. At first I imagined some poor person in there had exploded or whatever, but I figured somebody would figure it out and clean it up eventually.

Today was the first cold weather we’ve had in Vienna this winter. I don’t know the temperature, but frost crusted over all of the trees and the swimming ponds near my office building served as little tiny skating rinks for the lightest of birds—at least until the fog lifted and the sun made everything fluid and glowing again.

This office is a ghost town. Nobody works during the holidays, it seems. It’s been nice, because I’ve been meaning to get a lot of administrative and advance work out of the way for when the real onslaught begins, but I’ve been hampered by lots of little technical issues that are almost assuredly entirely due to me being a dumbass.

Some colleagues and I took advantage of the ghost town reality and traveled to a real Viennese mall, which is attached to a giant Viennese skyscraper made of glass, and ate Burger King for lunch today. I had a hamburger and fries, but each of my colleagues ate a Double Whopper with cheese and fries. Am I just gun shy or something?

I saw Austrian fast food today, and I don’t mean Würstelstand or Schnitzel. I saw genuine Austrian cuisine on offer such as Zwiebelrostbraten and Semmelknödel in soup. One could simply order it and take it away instantly. The mall also had a running sushi, Starbucks and KFC.

It’s funny. I never thought going to Burger King would seem exotic to me, and eating at fast food Austrian would seem really unappealing because, well, I can get Austrian food anywhere. So I ate Burger King. The first Burger King I’ve eaten in probably five or six years. In fact, it’s probably the only fast food I’ve had since the day I left Atlanta and got a bunch of McDonalds that made me sick (McDonalds has made me sick since I was a kid and I’ve never liked it, but I would eat the hell out of some Burger King or Taco Bell).

I’ve been to malls two days in a row now. You can tell because I smell like I’ve been out clubbing. You see, here in Austria, people smoke all over the place. I was waiting for my friendly One customer service representative at a different mall yesterday. The mall I went to today was really basic looking, but with a seemingly more affluent set of shoppers. The mall I went to yesterday looked really fancy (and oddly designed, with strange ramps and stairs for no reason at all), but was filled with the types of people you see drinking red bull and eating schnitzelsemmel on the U-bahn while talking loudly on their mobiles and checking out their fake tans and face jewelry in the window reflection.

Anyway, I took a number, and received #199. I looked at the board, and they were serving #89. I waited a good 40 minutes, and they were up to #145, so I bailed. I also bailed because some woman with a pit bull and a barely discernable manner of speaking German stood in the doorway smoking cigarettes. Technically, it’s verboten to smoke in areas other than the designated smoking areas, but nobody really cares, and she felt she was doing the right thing by simply standing right next to the entryway and letting her smoke drift in while we all sat on white leather sofas and read catalogs about mobile telephones.

So you eat Burger King, and people smoke in the food court, and sometimes you’re not sure what anyone is saying and you get yelled at, but it’s all exotic still. It’s interesting to be sitting with a Romanian as he explains to you how much he likes his “Whooper” but mocks you for drinking the “large” Coke (in my defense, I’m used to ordering larges and getting, like, a quarter litre, so my reflex to say large resulted in my getting a nearly American-sized 3/4 litre Coke, which is more Coke than I’ve had throughout the rest of 2006). Also, in his defense, he speaks better English than I do, but he just says “Whopper” funnily.

And speaking of getting yelled at, I have a new all-time greatest public transit abuse story. I’m sure I told you about the lady and the dog, so now I’ll tell you about the elderly lady, walking with a cane to catch the #49 Strassenbahn (street car). The very rear doors were just shutting, so she used her cane to try to stop them. Usually, when they detect something in their path, the doors spring back. But in this case, the doors clamped down on her cane, and the Strassenbahn moved off with her folding can now dangling from between its greedy-seeming teeth. I tried to help her. I banged on the side of the Strassenbahn, pushed the door button and yelled (“whoa” is what came out of my mouth, strangely enough), but the operator was far away and certainly couldn’t see us.

The woman looked absolutely miserable. Serious sadness washed across her face. Just then, another elderly man who had just disembarked from the streetcar, got in her face. “That was a stupid thing to do, you dumb old woman! What do you think is supposed to happen when you do something as stupid as shove your cane in the doors?”

She said something back to him, but he just continued “you shoved it in there!” and stormed off. She turned to me, again with her heartbroken brow.

“There is no camaraderie between humans anymore,” she began

“I think you’re right,” I replied. “Especially on transportation these days.”

She switched to English.

“I just don’t know where to get another one of those. And it’s so expensive!”

We empathized with her for a while and suggested that she take the next streetcar to the next stop, but she had already decided it was a loss and probably smashed to pieces.

This caps my record week in public transit bad vibes. Just the other day, while shopping for Maple’s Christmas presents, we were waiting for the U3 on Mariahilferstrasse. The train pulled up, but the lady closest to the doors wasn’t moving. She didn’t get on, make a move toward the door—nothing. She just stood there. Somebody opened the other door (they are double doors, but she was on the other side), and a line of people started moving onto the train. But she just stood there. Finally, I decided I would open the door for her. I walked forward, but just as I did it, a man who was inside the train decided to open the door and get off. Since he needed space to move off of the train, I twisted slightly to the side and allowed him to pass, but didn’t stop my forward progress since people were pushing in behind me.

“Nach Ihnen!” (after you!) I heard in total bitchy woman accent behind me.

I blew it off and found a spot and waited for my wife to get in. We stood near the opposite doors, and I said to my wife a little too loudly “I was trying to be nice and open the door for that lady, and she yelled at me.”

“You nearly trampled me!” she said in English.

“I was just trying to open the door for you.”

“They open automatically! It was not necessary.”

Here’s the thing: THEY DO NOT OPEN AUTOMATICALLY. One has to “pull sharply” as the door says, but this woman is such a clueless old bitty that she thinks that all those times the doors opened by someone else’s action were, in fact, the result of some magical or automated power. How can people get so stupid and uptight?

I was at two malls in two days. You can smell the smoke in my clothes.

The parking system at this mall I went to today was absolutely the lamest thing ever. You take the ticket at the gate as you pull into the garage, but then you have to remember to bring it in with you and validate it at a special terminal near the exit as you return to your car. If you forget to validate it before you walk through the garage and to your car, you have to pay the full day fare. It really seems like a scam just to fleece people who don’t understand the system (which, actually, isn’t really explained very well anywhere that I saw). Why can’t they just stamp your ticket when you pull in, then compute the time you were in the garage upon exit?

The old women of this town are struggling, apparently. They’re being trampled by Americans, robbed by streetcars and, apparently in the case of my downstairs neighbor, exploding. But not the awesome lady who owns the store I call “Milch”. She was friendly, and, as always, everything she sold me was “the best in town” or “totally fresh”. She even thanked me profusely for my “lovely order” of €21,00 worth of eggs, milk, beer, sugar, flour, salt, fruit and other items. I love this lady and this store. It is open nearly all the time—a rarity in Vienna—and she runs it with enthusiasm. She should, however, sit down and take a load off or take a day off now and again. Today she reminded me that she’ll be open on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

Today, when I came home with all of my groceries, a bank draft was left on the door of the crap-smelling apartment made out to my landlord. I somehow don’t think she’ll be collecting that check.