Writhe and Shine

From Writhe’s journal:

I arrive in Vienna and contact F right away. He picks me up outside the post office in the train station. While I w as waiting for him I noticed a lot of punk/goth-looking people hanging about, but those were just in the station. F reminds me of one of my uncles, quite tall, same buzz haircut, and thick coke bottle glasses with big plastic frames. He walks with a permanent limp as he cannot bend his left knee and I think he has a prosthetic leg. I ask him about it and he says that it was shorter than the other one. We walk to his apartment which is about 2 blocks away. It’s quite messy and a little cluttered with posters of girls in underwear plastered on some of the walls. He says they are from a highly sought after women’s underwear company. Collectible posters? I suppose so. He shows me a couple of books he has put together about our family (or at least people with the same or similar last name). I cannot find an exact link from him to me, but we just kind of assume we are distantly related. Then we go to a maze-like grocery store and get food for dinner, bring it back, and he cleans his filthy kitchen. I watch ants on the window sill. He shows me where i will sleep – on a homemade loft above the doorway to his bathroom. I finally find the toilet after dinner. He cooks a great meal of spaghetti and pork with tomatoes, onions and other stuff. we drink wine with seltzer water and have raspberry ice cream for dessert.
We bike downtown, which is about 10 minutes away, and see all the touristy sights at night. It starts to drizzle and we get a dark beer at a pub/restaurant that he likes to go to. I don’t drink the whole thing as it’s thicker than a Guinness. F talks at length about all of our familiar characteristic and the meaning of the name. It is all fascinating, but I’m very tired. We head back to his place and I fall asleep exhausted.
I get cold because I don’t have a blanket. I look around for one, but can’t find anything that would serve. I try to sleep some more and wake up frequently. F wakes up at 8:15 and tells me he has to work, so he gives me a map, a key to the apartment, a key to one of his bikes, and leaves. I change my shirt and head into the city.
I ride around for a while and stop at a huge music mega store. They have a very large goth/industrial section and I buy a few compilations of stuff I think I might be interested in. I visited the Art Museum (which was OK) and have lunch at a fast food place. In a busy park, I was handed a free can of some kind of grapefruit soda, which ends up tasting terrible.
I don’t know what it is, but Vienna just isn’t doing it for me as a city. There are some people who work for historical places that have to dress up in period costumes. You can tell it doesn’t look right somehow – they’re all kids on a summer job or something.
Now I’m sitting in some platz somewhere near a group of semi-punks about to write a bunch of postcards.