Wieners and Schnitzels

I finally got the DREAM job at Readak Educational Services .... Overseas Representative.

Vienna, Austria was my new home. What history! What beauty! What culture! ... the Vienna Boys Choir ... neutered at birth, The Lippizzan Stallions ... given steroids at birth, Wolfgang Mozart ... just plain wierd at birth. Wieners and schnitzels are everywhere. Dogs were revered  ... so much so that children were banished to the back seats of cars, forced to give their "shotgun" seat to the family German shepherd. Beer had an alcoholic content of 357%.

What a place! 

Okay ... so what if Hitler was Austrian and Vienna has the worst history of anti-semitism in the world. Don't forget ... Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Franz Kafka ... all were Jewish (I sound like an Adam Sandler song). I think it was only about 10 years ago that Austrians admitted that there may have actually been a Holocaust. I'm sure the 15,000 remaining Jews living there were satisfied with that realization (considering there were once more than 300,000 Jews in Vienna prior to WWII).

I taught at The American International School of Vienna. It was one of a number of AIS schools scattered around the world ... a partnership of the US and the UN. The student population was 50% American and 50% multinational ... all spoke English.

Every day I would take this old double decker bus called the 35A. It was a great bus. I'll never forget it ... in fact I wrote a song about it. Here are a couple of verses ...     

The 35A goes one way
Gets to the end and goes the other way
Comes back down
Turns around
Never gets to town
Never leaves the ground

The 35As comin back around this way.

It's got two floors so you can choose
Sit on the first and you smell the booze
Sit on the second you sing the blues
If the kids don't get you the old folks do

The 35As comin back around this way ...