You Know You are Still in Europe When....

Rode my bike home at 10 PM tonight, after my class finished. There was a thunderstorm, moderate at first, but it picked up force as I rode along the Danube toward the train. Lightning slashed horizontally across the sky. I tried to remember everything I had once heard regarding thunderstorm safey. Can you get hit while riding a bike, or do the rubber tires protect you? I remember there was this generally accepted fact that turns out to be a myth, but I can't remember which is which. Ah, well. Ride faster.

Took my bike on the subway three stops and climbed out at Schwedenplatz, along the Ring, on the edge of the Old City. It was now pouring. Still, tourists and commuters hung around the busy station and debated where to go, how to go, whether to go.

I rode along the Ring. At an underpass along the canal there was a public screening of the World Cup. About a hundred people were gathered in chairs. Stage lights illuminated the area around them.

Farther on, I rode across the university quad. A giant screen TV was set up under a large, circus-like tent. Just as I passed, the crowd moaned and groaned about something. A bad call presumably.

I came to a busy intersection, now utterly soaked and cold, and waited for the light to change. I was about to start across the intersection when I made out the shape of a bicyclist coming toward me fast, running the light, in spite of the cross-traffic and the pouring rain. No light, of course.

As the shadow moved past me, I realized it was a young woman on the bike, her hair in a pony tail (no helmut, of course). She was wearing a black cocktail dress and high heels.

For a moment I thought I was dreaming and then remembered, no, I'm in Vienna.