An icy parking lot in Vienna. Vienna was a good city - for living. I’m not convinced it’s the ultimate tourist destination as it doesn’t outrageously dazzle or charm, but I could see it being a fine place to live a chic, well-read European life.
My favorite moment was slipping into a local pet shop, ducking German language questions about my interest in guinea pigs, and discovering that the tropical fish they sell on the other side of the Atlantic are just the same as the ones they sell in a California Petco.
Pet stores, shrines to captured, coddled animals, are surprisingly not as uniquely American as I had thought. Not that I’ve ever spent hours contemplating animal trafficking, but just, culturally, that’s how it’s always seemed to me. A store that sells living beings? Aren’t we Americans just sick and commoditized enough to have come up with that? Yes. But we are not alone.