Vienna #5of5

On our first visit to Vienna, Emmy wasn’t feeling well. I checked, then said, “You feel just fine to me!” After we checked into Camping Wien Sud, on Breitenfurter Straße, I rode the bus and streetcar downtown. When I returned I had a McDonald’s bag with a Big Mac and French Fries for the invalid. Next morning Emmy said, “I feel much better,” and I said, “I’ll be the judge of that.”

One morning Emmy had planned to sleep late, but traffic noise woke her early, so we drove to downtown Vienna. We walked to the basement bakery of a department store where I had been another day, and bought a certain kind of sweet roll that I liked. It’s not always easy to find the ones I savor.

At a buffet restaurant in Vienna one year, Emmy had a snack, could not really call it lunch. She went through the line with a very small plate, then they weighed the plate with very little food, and charged by weight. Almost no food, for $4.

We generally found prices in Austria, and especially in Vienna, to be the most expensive in Europe. At a butcher shop I ordered a half-kilo of ground beef. They cut up a nice piece of beef (filet mignon?) and charged $8 a pound. But very tasty.

We walked and walked through downtown Vienna, and one morning stopped at McDonald’s and asked for Egg McMuffin. The nice lady who ran the place said they have never served them in Vienna, no one ever asked for one. For the next few days whenever I was close to that McDonald’s, I would stop and ask her for an Egg McMuffin. I told her to tell her boss people had been asking for Egg McMuffin all week.

The first year, we visited a laundromat near the campsite. The cost was incredible, they charged $4 per load (we paid even more in Rome). In downtown Vienna we saw a large new laundromat, with a dozen or more washing machines and dryers made in the USA, and their price was about the same.

A few years later we stopped at several laundries, and they all said there are no self-serve Laundromats in Vienna anymore. (Would you believe that?) A man at a gas station misunderstood our request, and sent us to an automatic car wash. Finally, at a shopping center we found a Laundromat that charged about the same, $4. We owned an apartment building in Los Angeles. We charged 25¢ to wash, 10¢ to dry.