So by this point, my feet hurt about as much as they did the night of the wedding. It's World Cup season, so we went in search of Public Viewing, aka. someone set up a tv in front of a bunch of picnic tables somewhere.
There's a lot of interesting graffiti along the Donaukanal.
This is the Donaukanal. The actual Donau is a ways away in the opposite direction. The Donaukanal runs through the inner city of Vienna and was originally an old path of the river itself that started to be regulated in the 16th century.
There are a lot of little bars along the bank of the Donaukanal. The group went to a bar that was supposed to be particularly well populated with Germany fans. It was, but at that point my feet hurt a lot and I couldn't stand up in the crowd like they were, so I split away from the group and ended up with a chair six feet from the screen at the next little bar upstream. It was more populated by Portugal fans, but I didn't care.
I was sitting next to the person whose feet you can see sticking out next to the tv. The sun was still reflecting off the screen pretty badly, but that got better as the game went on and at that point the most important thing was getting off my feet.
After watching German thrash Portugal, I went back to rejoin the group.
Laughing over a funny joke.
The others were in the mood to go eating then bar hopping and because I'm an eternal optimist and was trying to make a show of being less introverted I went along. I've got to stop doing that. This involved a lot of walking on sore feet.
This is the Virgilkapelle, one of the original religious buildings on the site of the Stephansdom. It's visible from a stairway in the U-Bahn station.
The presence of the chapel is marked from above by an outline in the bricks.
We went to a cafeteria-style Italian restaurant and I got a salad and dessert since I wasn't super hungry.
Then the kids went in search of booze and I followed along. As I'm typing this one of my toes is partially numb and my back hurts. I did something in Vienna that screwed up my foot and it's increasingly looking like a back injury of some sort.
The buildings are lovely at night.
It turns out I'm the only one whose Austrian cellphone has a data plan (and a rather nice one at that), so I loaned it briefly to David, who was leading the group, in order to search for interesting bars. He found this one which had an interesting atmosphere and pricey cocktails. I ordered pineapple juice because I don't feel comfortable drinking in public for Reasons my friends know already.
After deciding that was too expensive, the group wandered further.
We waited around at Karlsplatz for awhile while they tried to figure out how to procure the cheapest alcohol. I still don't understand the appeal but it gave me a chance to sit on a bench for awhile.
We ended up in a bar that was pretty close to the hotel. We played a game of table soccer then I left when David got trashed and started extolling on the philosophy of the sexist doucheweasels, aka how to trick women into ignoring your glaring personality defects long enough to sleep with them in order to impress other men. For some reason his girlfriend had recently broken up with him.
It took me awhile to get to sleep so the next day I was rather groggy at breakfast, but I wasn't the only one. Next post: HORSIES!!
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