The Usual Suspects
For the last couple of weeks my wife and I have been in Vienna. Every day we take the 57A bus from our AirB&B at one end of the line (Amschutzgasse) to our daughter’s apartment 3/4ths of the way to the city center. (Burgring) As we travel in we pass a lot of what makes Vienna a European city. Both sides of the street are a solid wall of 4 and 5 story apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor. The majority were built 100 years ago when the city entered a phase of rapid expansion. But closer in you see the odd two story building from the early 19th or late 18th century. Sometimes a new building jumps out, almost always the replacement of one hit by a bomb in WWII. Where we are staying could be called an immigrant district, with close to a majority being Turkish, followed by Serbs, Koreans, Arabs, and Chinese. When we lived here (a few blocks from where we stay now) I used to joke that German was our common language and none of us spoke it well. That’s less true no...