Yesterday was Alpha’s birthday. We… Alpha is a beautiful person. I love her.

The evening went okay. By the evening, a lot of people had remembered her birthday and given her flowers. I even managed to give her flowers.

I’ve done better birthdays, I admit.

The restaurant was very good. You really missed something, Pat. The name of the restaurant is “Wrenkh”. There are 3 in Vienna. We went to the best one, in the first district (1010). Do you own google search for details. But it’s a funky little place in a designy way and we both had… risotto. With what is called “Baerlauch” (actually, the ae should be an umlaut “a” with those two little dots over it, but not everyone has umlauts on their computers and I forget the code) in German and for the life of me I can’t find the English translation (Joeri??). It is a plant that grows wild, smells like garlic (we were walking thru the woods by the Danube on the weekend and it was in full swing and the air smelled like garlic) and I suppose may be some sort of leek since “Lauch” means leek in German. Bear leek, I’ll call it. It looks a lot like lily of the valley, the leaves, which are the part you eat, with the difference that bear leek is edible, of coures, while lily of the valley is poisonous, a fact that causes the number of amateur bear leek harvesters to fall by a few every year.

Bear leek risotto is not the food of romance, unfortunately, for reasons I will not list here.

But it was very tasty. The wine was good, etc etc. Good service.

Oh, I just remembered the original gag I was going to do in this post. We met by the State Opera in Vienna – there’s an underground parking lot there. Then we ambled across the street and got a coffee to go at the new Star*uck’s there. Then we walked the length of the Kaerntnerstrasse, turned left by St. Stephen’s Cathedral at the Stock-im-Eisen-Platz and walked to the end of the Graben, where we had icecream to go at the Haagen Dazs. That’s what European dates are like nowadays.

Then Alpha got a foot rub. With lavender oil.