Metamorphosism

Blah blah vanilla blah blah blah

The sign outside said Happy Hour but the drinks cost the same as always and the waiters were delightfully cranky. I sat across from Anne, feeling suave as my penultimate cigarette dangled from my lip and I felt my pockets looking for my lighter.
Anne made the international gesture for "turn your cigarette around, you're trying to light the filter".
She had come all the way from Brno to watch me smoke my final pack of cigarettes as we wandered around Vienna.

We did the standard Mig tour of Vienna. Luckily Anne likes to wander around aimlessly, or at least she's not a complainer. We walked through Stephansplatz station and I pointed out the restroom where the guys hang out and the Virgil Chapel.
We went and had coffee at the Hawelka coffeehouse. Mr. Hawelka was there, directing visitors to tables, as he has for the past 100 years. Then we went to the coffeehouse restroom, separately, and then we wandered over to this nice courtyard I always try to show visitors, only it is always locked. "It's nice inside, I said." We pressed our faces up to the windows in the doors.
My wife called and told me to get her some skin cream for Nikolo, which is today, 6 December. It was really noisy when she called and all I understood was blah blah skin cream blah vanilla blah blah.
So I started wandering towards Body Shop and then she called back and said don't buy anything after all because she bought herself something I should buy myself something instead. So we wandered in the opposite direction and got sushi for lunch. Anne paid.
Then we were going to wander back for a book for me but my wife called and said get a shepherd for our nativity scene. How big I said. She said she was on her way home to measure Joseph and she'd let me know. So we went to the advent market at the palace, Schönbrunn palace where I realized buying a figure for a nativity scene would be easy in principle, but in fact a suicide mission because there was little chance I'd get the right one so we had punch, which is a hot sweet drink here with rum.
Alpha called and said Joseph is seven centimeters tall, hand painted wood. The stand had either 6.5 cm, plain wood, 6.5 cm plastic painted, or 9 cm wood painted, and upwards from there. I called back and asked if Joseph was kneeling by any chance, in which case 9 cm would have worked. But no, he was standing. I told the woman at the stand. She said are the colors bright or subdued? I called Alpha and she said, subdued. So I got a 9 cm shepherd with a sheep over his shoulder. At first I was going to take Anne home to meet Alpha but it would have been too big of a rush so we decided to go back into town and wander around some more.
Alpha called and we talked about something and in the course of it somehow it was decided that I should get her something else after all so we went back to the Body Shop and got her vanilla skin cream and went and looked at Vienna's oldest church and bought a book for me.
It was quite cold. At Stephansplatz station I gave Anne 50 cents so she could go to the restroom (you have to pay the toilet ladies here). I risked a pee in the men's room and my old buddies were all there.
Overall it was a lot of fun. Anne is good to talk to. Alpha likes skin cream, any fragrance but vanilla.