Zac: Now with 50% more pants

After a week or so of having two pairs of hole-y pants (both in the same, not great place for holes) I went to an H&M in Vienna for some new duds. They're gray, kind of plain, but now I have three pairs of pants and one of them only has the leg and waist holes. Sweet. I still can't part with my jeans though.

I used these new, holeless pants to go to the Opera in Vienna because I'm classy like that. When we went to the ticket counter on Friday, I asked the guy (after asking if he sprecken sie English) if there were tickets for the Saturday show. He said, "There are tickets for 157 euro, 127 euro, and 9 euro partially obstructed."

I immediately, and with the class only a man with a hole in his pants can muster (I had yet to purchase them), asked "How obstructed."

We'd be able to see more than half the stage he said, which is a lot more than half the opera I'd seen in the first 24.5 years of my life, so we did it. By coincidence, the photo from Wikipedia is practically from our seat. Had the photographer looked right, you'd be able to see the stage. Or at least, more than half of it.

The opera was by Puccini, and tomorrow night is La Boheme, but we couldn't justify staying in an expensive town with little to do for an extra two nights just so I could see the opera that we'd heard of (if only because it was the basis of "RENT").

"Manon Lescault" is about a girl who falls in love with a student but then leaves him (between acts, creating a jarring scene change) for a rich man. She then wants the poor kid and the rich man, has them concurrently for a short time (5 minutes probably) then gets arrested and banished to the deserts of Louisiana where she and the kid (who like a whipped moron followed her into exile) die.

Actually, he lives. But the moral of the story is: women should die in the desert? I don't really know. It was cool though because each seat had little screens the size of an iPod that displayed subtitles in German or English on the rail in front of them. I opted for English.

In Budapest now. For dinner I had pork with bacon and croquettes. So good. And cheap. I feel like a millionaire. My dinner was 1590ft (not long, that's their money). I also just bought a bottle of wine that cost 257! I bet it's a really good.

It gets dark early here because we're so far east, but still in the same time zone. It's strange, and since it's Sunday pretty much everything is closing down. Luckily, they have free Internet here and satellite TV.

For more information on the opera house where Mozart debuted "Don Giovanni," click the following link. The Wiener Staatsoper