Energy boost

Every morning from Monday to Friday I get off the bus at "Volkstheater" and walk the last leg of the journey to my office instead of taking the tram. It's a nice 12-minute walk and I look forward to it every day because of the shortcut I take through Volksgarten, my favourite park in Vienna. I can't remember a morning when I didn't see a team of gardeners tending to the trees, shrubs and flowers. The rose-garden is particularly beautiful and very pretty but rather uncomfortable chairs are provided for visitors to sit and enjoy the picturesque and fragrant rose-garden. Right now, all the rose trees are protected by jute sacks, giving them the sinister appearance of hapless culprits awaiting their execution.

Volksgarten is popular among joggers, nordic walkers, practitioners of tai chi and tourists alike and there used to be a group of 10 - 15 people who watched their golden retrievers frolic around every morning. They seem to have moved to the adjacent Heldenplatz and I wonder whether they have been reprimanded by the gardeners for some dog-related offense of if the thoroughbreds and their fur-coat-clad owners just felt like some change of scenery.

My favourite spot in the park, which apart from roses boasts several monuments and fountains, is the pseudo-Grecian Theseus temple, a small-scale 19th-century copy of the Theseion in Athens. In summer, FCN and I often have a picnic in our lunch-breaks there, munching our sandwiches in the shade of its columns while we bitch about work, watch children and dogs jump through sprinklers and try to avoid the old ladies offering to read our palms.

In autumn, it looks like this:

and soon it will hopefully be as snow-covered as it was in January this year:

In the background you can see the neo-Gothic City Hall. (The pavillion on the right is a public toilet by the way...)

My brisk walk through Volksgarten gives me a (much-needed) energy boost every morning. Besides, I wouldn't even save time on the tram which is smelly, full of hatchet-faced people and at this time of the year in particular a breeding ground for germs you are better off without.

Lunch-break purchases: It's raining quite heavily today and as I didn't have an umbrella (I loathe them!) with me I just sprinted to the supermarket to buy food for tonight, followed by a pit-stop at the Manner store to buy some chocolate St. Nicholases and Krampusse for the office.