One fateful night in Vienna, I literally ran right into the middle of some kind of socialist/anarchist/communist/general rabble-rousing protest. I think I'm subconsciously attracted to this kind of thing, because three years ago when I visited the city I arrived in the middle of a massive pride parade. There were people wearing t-shirts with catchy anti-capitalist slogans done up in various corporate fonts, signs exhorting people to forgo voting in favor of "making trouble" (a rather vague request), and marchers carrying banners suggesting the dissolution of all international boundaries. Along with the usual crowd of pierced, dyed, and alternatively-clothed youth, it all made me wish I'd gone running in a ripped Social Distortion shirt and a lot of hemp.
The reason why ended up there in the first place was to figure out the source of the percussion that'd made its way past my headphones, and it turns out that no political gathering is complete without a political band. I wanted to figure out exactly what was being protested (and which ideology(s) were doing the protesting), but my timing was terrible, given that I was in the middle of an hour-long run. So I sped away, resisting the siren song of electric violins, and resolved to come back once I was done, figuring that surely they'd still have something to protest in an hour.
Wrong! Turns out these things run on a schedule, and so they were all cleared out by ten. I got to watch the stage getting packed up into a van, and there weren't even any posters strewn on the ground or scrawled chalk messages left over to give me any clues as to what the hell I'd just seen. Damn European socialism, so timely with its state-sanctioned sanitation - this sort of thing would never happen in America! I had to resign myself to taking pictures of the city at night, instead of enraged activists. It worked out kind of nicely, since the following is my walk to work in reverse.
I was amused to find that the rearing horse statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy is the place to go if you're under thirty and drunk on a Thursday night. It's a big change from the tourist crowd.
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| My place of work, looking rather dazzling in the moonlight |
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| The Rathaus, not actually full of rodents. |
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| Pretty by day, the Museum of Natural History shines at night. |
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| One of many classy Kaffeehauser in Vienna. |
