• Valentine's Day for the kids - no candy hearts, no making Valentines for every student in your class.
• Halloween - although the retailers have started to sell candy, and it may catch on within a few years.
• Chocolate chips.
• Good soymilk - Silk® Vanilla, in particular (nothing else compares…)
• Radio stations playing German-language popular music…incredible, but they always seem to play the same English-language pop found all over the world. I've endured such timeless (read: inescapable) classics as "In The Navy", "The Ghostbusters Theme", and "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" at the laundromat and the Billa.
• Places to shop on Sunday - It's nice to have one day a week away from consumerism. But don't forget to buy your groceries on Saturday.
• Lampposts.
THINGS THAT DO EXIST IN VIENNA:
• Valentine's Day for the adults - candlelit dinners, romantic evenings, and heart-shaped pillows that say "Ich liebe dich".
• Chocolate Chip Cookies - ever resourceful, we bought a large chocolate bar and chopped it into little bits to add to the cookie batter. Best chocolate chip cookies I've had in years.
• Good opera every night of the year - I recently saw my first Wagner opera, "The Flying Dutchman", marvelously performed and dramatically staged. (To see & hear excerpts from this production, click the link and then "Videobeispiel".)
• We Will Rock You - "A new musical by Queen and Ben Elton" - I'm quite tempted to go, even though I love the music of Queen (and am wary of it being ruined), because I confess to being intrigued by the spectacle and kitsch of it all. It looks like they're trying to outdo Baz Luhrmann for over-the-top production and incessant stimulation, and to outdo Ed Wood for dreadful scripts. Check out some pictures, and a "plot" synopsis.
• Colorado-style weather - Here's what happened today. 8am: Snow. 10am: Sun comes out and melts it. Noon: It's quite cold out. 2pm: It's quite warm out. 3pm: More snow. 4pm: More sun. Tomorrow's forecast: Cloudy with a chance of bratwurst.
• Serious recycling - These bins for plastic, metal, and glass can be found on every other street corner. What's truly amazing is that there are some bins for compost as well! Instead of being wasted in a landfill, our food scraps and peelings can enrich the soil of nearby farms or gardens. Rosalind (being an avid gardener, but currently lacking a garden) is especially excited to know this.
• High-tension wires strung up between buildings - to make up for the lack of lampposts.
• Flammkuchen - this is like a pizza, but much thinner and without tomato sauce. In this case, the only toppings are strong cheese and spicy little pepperoncini. [This picture & this flammkuchen were taken/eaten in Munich. Check back soon for the full story from my recent trip to Germany!]
• Cartoons about sausage people - I think you can probably translate these for yourselves.
