I’ve been broke in Vienna, too, Scott, and it was as charming as you describe. When I was a student we used to invite friends to our apartment once a week to cook macaroni and macaroni (we often didn’t have any cheese) because the combination of guests and boiling noodles warmed our apartment above freezing.

When I lived in Vienna, I was student poor. Delights like the Kaesekrainer (a cheese-injected, plump sausage) or anything that required extra labor, such as frying or grilling (always an extra charge) were a rare and relished treat. I had to languish in the lower end of the Wurstelstandt menu: Burenwurst (gekocht, not gegrillt, which cost extra), hotdog spezial mit sharfen Senf from the stand near Schwedenplatz en route to school. I became intimate with several of the finer (by my book) purveyors. On my last night in my Hausfrau’s apartment, before I transferred across town to stay another couple weeks in the stoner school teacher’s apartment, the nice lady at my corner Wurstelstand gave me a free meal and a chocolate bar “fuer die Reise” — for the trip.

When I lived in Vienna, walking a mile seemed like nothing. I would walk from my apartment near Franz Josef’s Bahnhof all the way to Johanessgasse in the First District and usually make it in less time than had I taken the streetcar-UBahn-UBahn commute route. I was a power walker, and poor. I would walk from a rock club in the outer reaches all the way across the city to my home to avoid the cab fare. Despite my steady diet of sausages and many, many beers, I was losing weight. Too few calories in, many, many calories consumed by the walking. Always walking. Always exploring.

In a way, I wish I could move to a new city every two years so I could walk like that — where everything seems new and foreign. I like that feeling. I spent a hot summer in Atlanta when I first arrived, unemployed, and walking. Sweating. Walking through Sweet Auburn to get homemade ginger beer from the Jamaicans. Plowing through the then-vacant wastelands of intown Atlanta, I could walk from Little Five Points to Midtown without ever using a street. Crumbled foundations, burnt-out mills. Now they’ve put condos on every scrap of that former urban forest. Where I used to trip over homeless sleepers, people now sleep in stacks, partitioned by sheet rock and newly-set hardwood floors.

/looks around for flights on web.