As I said, the time is running out and my activities are winding down. Yesterday Karen and I went to Café Central for several hours to plan our projects. The quality of service at Viennese cafes is measured by how slow it is. They will never bring you the check until you ask for it, and even then it will take at least 20 minutes. That’s because once you sit down you have rented that space in the booth and it would be incredibly rude of the waiter to rush you. I will definitely miss this concept when I return to the much faster pace of life in Seattle.

In the evening, Mary and I went out for our final “roommate date.” She took me to see The Third Man, and boy am I glad I went while I was still here. It would have been incredibly depressing to rent it in a few weeks and not be able to walk around Vienna looking at all the places that are in the film. There’s a scene where they run into a movie theater, and that’s the theater where we were watching it! And right at the beginning the “count” says something like, “Meet me at Café Mozart,” so after the movie that was the first place we went. We spent the rest of the date walking across Vienna, stopping at various places, until we finally ended up back at our hotel, watching the moon travel across the top of Stephansdom.

My project is now called, “Don Giovanni through the ages,” and involves looking at some of the Don Juan archetypes and seeing how they are manifested based on the time period in which each adaptation of the story has been set. Are the rules that Don Juan breaks different in the Baroque Era than they are in the Modern Age? This is the question I will be asking as I used the myth of Don Juan to examine each major time period. Doesn’t that sound interesting? That’s just the kind of idea you can come up with when sitting in a Viennese café for hours. If only we had someplace like that in Seattle.