If same-sex marriages ever become legal in Washington State, I will be very tempted to marry my brother-in-law.

Listen: this is just a few hours of one day of the two weeks my sister and her family spent with us in Austria. Which we are now recalling fondly, FYI.

We shall take them to the House of Music, said one of us.
Yes, let’s, said the other. It is educational and has many entertaining interactive displays for children.

We shall aim at 9.00 for a departure time, said one of us.
Fine! Let’s, said the other.

Listen: recall my formula for chaos? The chaos coefficient? Generally, this is how it works: the average chaos in your life is a function of the number of family members and pets in your household. Specifically, this is the formula:

C=(f+p)^f
In my case, with three pets and four family members, that works out to this:
2401=(4+3)⁴.

However, with four relatives visiting, we had a chaos coefficient not of 2401 but of 214,358,881, so breakfast took longer than planned and we got to Vienna around lunchtime.

The kids (the kids, not my kids) were hungry and cranky as they had not eaten much breakfast to speak of so we went straight to an Asian restaurant, assuming correctly that service would be fast, food would be delicious and include vegetarian options for the vegetarians and pseudo-vegetarians in our party. Tables were moved to accomodate us. We ordered beverages and changed our orders repeatedly (Not tea, cola. Not cola, mineral water. But only if it’s without gas (“with gas” and “without gas” although not correct English nor German had become popular with us by this time, since a waiter somewhere had said it to us in his quaint English and we all adopted it…) We ate and paid and left and the tables we had occupied looked as if a blind rugby team on crystal meth had had a mass seizure there.

We took a horse ride around Vienna after that. I highly recommend that to anyone visiting Vienna, take a Fiaker ride. Those are the horse-drawn carriages that convey you slowly through the streets while the driver points out things of interest. (The modifier “horse-drawn” is unnecessary, I guess, as there are no carriages drawn by anything else here, unless you count the pedicabs which are perhaps propelled by pedifiles (that reminds me, I had always envied an acquaintance of mine for an encounter she had with a foot-fetishist outside a hotel once – he glanced at her feet and told her correctly what shoe size she wore before inviting her somewhere; I went shoe-shopping last week and the sales lady did that to me: it was so nice, I nearly proposed to her. Maybe it’s just me)). In Venice you take a gondola ride (also recommended) and in Vienna a Fiaker. It costs a bit, between