The Long and Winding Road

Well, it took what felt like a year, but we made it to Linz! And yeah, I was a little suspicious when I couldn't find any travel guides for the place, but I really didn't expect the area to be Florida suburb meets Great Plains. Funny how you come to expect great bridges and monuments to great art when you travel abroad, but we're just in a normal town. That is, until you realize that you honestly can't communicate because the restaurants aren't geared towards tourists. But all that confusion began long before arriving in Linz.

Today's great mistakes in communication:

We flew Lufthansa for both legs of our flight. On the way to Frankfurt, a waiter offerred me some wine to go with my dinner. I replied, "half a glass, please." He looked at me like I has two heads, then proceeded to read me the entire contents of the wine label. Apparently, he thought I was asking about the details of the wine vintage ... of the wine being served on an airplane.

Then, in Linz, we were starving and unfamiliar with the surrounding area, so we just walked until we found the first building with the word "restaurant" in it. After a painful attempt at ordering food (we asked what they, the waiter replied "toast or baguette." At a loss, I ordered a baguette - turnes out it was more like pizza, and actually pretty tasty. A friend asked for a light. Then later, again. I asked the waiter how to say lighter so we didn't have to keep miming it to him, and as he clutched the lighter to his chest, he spat in broken English, "NO - it's my last one!" So now I'm apparently trying to con the guy out of his beloved lighter. Also, this bar looks like a real collection of locals - a bunch of sweaty, liquored-up dudes. We joke that they haven't seen a woman in here in years. Turns out we were right - because it's a gay bar. Professor Lanier was kind enough to fill us in when we explained our strange lunch experience to him later.