Guten Morgen, Hank, es ist Mittwoch!

I woke up in Munich around 8 am feeling pretty jet-lagged. Even my yawns have yawns. Then I went down to the S-Bahn where I was reminded that without warning, death rays from space might throw me onto the track. Nonetheless, I managed to make it to the airport and then caught a plane to Vienna, wherein the safety card explicitly mentioned two things I could not use on the plane: My phone, and my remote control car. Then we landed in Vienna, which is locked in a fierce competition with Munich for World's greyest sky.

I took a cab to my hotel room, and then set out to explore the city. I'd never been to Vienna before, but it's a great city for new visitors, because it's very dense, and there are these huge streets that are for pedestrians only. The first thing I noticed is that Vienna is packed with Babies. Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby, Rotating Mozart head, Baby, Baby. Aaoohh! Babies! They made me miss Henry. Don't tell me they're cherubs! They're not cherubs! They're babies, adorable dancing babies!

*glancing over shoulder* Those pigeons are distressingly close to me. Immediately thereafter, a pigeon crapped on my coat, and because I am smart, I wiped it off with my hand. Then I kept walking. I saw Goethe, and a two-headed eagle, and narcissistic graffiti and this building, which happened to feature the world's most awesome bird! I'm the king of the birds! Imma fly away now. Then I went to a park and saw Mozart, and more babies, and space invaders opposed to homophobia and do-not-tread-on-the-green-pressure-pad-or-you-will-be-shot-with-a-laser-and-your-head-will-come-off! Also, no dogs allowed. Sexy poses, on the other hand, are encouraged.

I walked for a while longer, until I reached the Albertina museum, where William Kentridge, one of my favorite artists, was on exhibit. Well, he wasn't on exhibit, but his artwork was. *text on screen says "footage redacted due to residual fear of Austrian security guards* Hank, the show was so good that I took out my camcorder to show some of it to you, whereupon my camcorder was immediately confiscated by security. The next forty minutes of my footage is just this. *weird noises are heard, and screen is black/dark grey* I don't know what that guy is doing with my camcorder, but it seems unholy. Well, the important thing is that I got my camera back.

Then I walked over to St. Stephens Cathedral because I'd heard you could tour the catacombs, and I love me some catacombs. You weren't allowed to film down there either, but I did get some footage of these urns, which contain the pickled innards of various Habsburgs, including Franz Joseph I, shown here, whose beard clippings, sadly, were not preserved. But while I can't show you much of what I saw down in the catacombs, I can show you what was happening that day directly above them. Inside the church, people lit candles and took pictures. Outside in the square, a balloon man waited for customers, while a huge crowd of people surrounded a b-boy dance crew. There are more than eleven thousand people buried beneath this square, and when the catacombs got full, prisoners were sent down to stack the bones of the decomposed in order to free up more space. I got a little footage of one such bone room. For four hundred years, Vienna buried it's dead down here, but they quit in 1783 because the stench of decomposition had become so overwhelming that people no longer wanted to go to church. Hearing that made me think about all the ways that the dead haunt us, and it made me wonder how do we best honor the dead? By placing them close to our sacred spaces, by marveling at the extraordinary places they've made for us? That is not a rhetorical question, by the way. As I walked alone around Vienna that night, I kept wondering, what if anything, do we owe the dead? Hank, I'll see you tomorrow.