Well here we are in Linz, a torougly modern city straddling a river that is in the process of building a city-wide network of free Wifi hotspots.

The sun is beating down, almost blinding us through the top-floor windows of the Ars Technica museum where’re drinking tea and eating our seven thousandth portion of apple strudel since arriving in Austria, having spent the afternoon playing with virtual reality machines, robots and 3D worlds that don’t really exist.

Austria is a strange country. Everyone is exceptionally polite, and everyone seems to speak English, without exception very good English. They are also quite closely tied into the past, though. We have seen a lot of people wearing traditional dress, and even guys in their early twenties roaming the streets on a Friday night wearing leiderhosen.

Without exception, the food has been excellent, although I can’t understand why everyone here isn’t the size of a house. It’s all so packed with cream and cheese that you can’t help but end a day feeling greasy and fat, even if you’ve had very little. The main drink, of course, is beer, but it seems that measures are very strictly controlled, and spirits come in even smaller measures than they do at home, which wine is often measured out by the eighth of a litre.

The trains have treated us well. They have been clean and well run, and cheap to use. Having said that I’ve probably jinxed us for the next leg of our journey on to Innsbruck tomorrow, but if we have just one bad journey out of almost three weeks’ travelling then we can consider ourselves lucky, I think.

CNN is driving me mad, though. Katrina Katrina Katrina. Yes, I know. It’s terrible. But that’s no reason to apologise for doing other stories as well. They really do. ‘More on Katrina coming up in a minute, but first let’s look at what else is happening in the world.’

Two minutes later you are rewatching more or less the same clip of flooding as you saw five times already.

Unfortunately it is the only English-language channel in most of the hotels, so if you don’t want music and you don’t speak German so well then it’s your only option.

I am feeling thoroughly relaxed, though. I have only checked my email once, and then really only cleared out the spam and turned down an interview request, so I am quite out of touch with what is going on at home. I’ve logged onto my online bank once, and seen that the 512MB memory card I bought in Bratislava cost only

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 11th, 2005 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.