My European exploits continue this week. I am now in an unseasonably cold Vienna. Not that that has stopped me from taking long walks in the morning and planning my days around meals at restaurants I want to enjoy. Such a program has its hits and its misses. Yesterday I walked the entire Ringstrasse, one of the world’s great boulevards. I timed it so that I ate an early lunch at one of the restaurants in the Michelin guidebook, one especially chosen for its discounted lunch prices. This is, after all, not the first time I have visited Europe. It was a lovely meal with myriad subtle flavors (rhubarb blueberry lemonade anyone?), a craft saison with elderberry with an unexpected dry taste given its sweet/sour smell, and a waitress that started in German each time she visited my table. My German is much better than my French, but it is nowhere near as good as my Spanish and I am unable to speak in complete or even coherent sentences on most subjects. That she kept speaking to me in German was more a reflection on my appearance than anything else, something I have come to expect in this part of the world. Lunch also ended up being cheaper than my rushed dinner that was of much lower quality. As I said, hits and misses.

I visited the Belvedere Museum on Sunday and despite watching a well-written YouTube video about the significance of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” did not find myself moved by it in the same way as I do when I stand before the Impressionist masterpieces. There was a quirky bit that ties into the conference from last week as the museum has minted NFTs of portions of its most famous painting, almost as if each dot in a pointillist work were being sold individually. We are still in the earliest stages of NFTs and it is still a technology searching for meaningful use cases, but the advent of these “overpriced JPEGs” has already altered the economic fundamentals of the art world at every level.

Today I visited the Albertina Museum. It is more my style with its Monets, Picassos, and even a few drawings by Michelangelo, but there was one exhibition that only made me uneasy. Most of its works were scenes from a psych ward—no people, just cold furniture, walls, and doors. The artist had himself suffered a mental breakdown and his time in a psych hospital was his inspiration for the series. I wish he’d found a different muse, but at least that was the first exhibition I visited and so the better parts of the visit came afterwards to chase away the ickiness.

I am working from a table at a Viennese café editing this. I considered a coworking space but opted against it given that this is Vienna, a city famous for its cafés. I don’t drink coffee or tea and much of the romance is lost as I sit working at my computer and not reading a newspaper, editing a manuscript, or having some philosophical conversation. Still, I am doing it. It is unlikely to help me make any new acquaintances, but it is a gesture in that direction. Finding comrades, that difficult task under any circumstances, may prove the most difficult part of a digital nomad lifestyle.