The night before, Roger decided to sleep on our couch instead of heading to check in at his own Airbnb, so in the morning he got up and went to drop his stuff off. Elizabeth was exhausted from her travels, so she slept in.
Allan and Benton worked (Allan doesn’t have a job, but he had some take home tests using PHP, a programming language that he doesn’t know, that a company wanted him to do) in the morning while Ryan chilled, and eventually we ended up walking to Freyja - the croissant story, where we all convened.
From there, we walked towards the Neubau area, stopping into a few vintage shops (Elizabeth bought a fun rain jacket since she didn’t pack one for the trip), and generally enjoying the nicer weather on this day. We then translate over to CopaBeach (along the Danube), where (as fits with the theme of Vienna), absolutely everything seemed to be closed. Fortunately, we found one small bike rental shop, and we rented bikes to ride along the Danube (which was super nice with the weather, though there were lots of bugs when we went closer to the water). See map (the orange) for the biking route.
After riding for about an hour (and stumbling onto a vintage car show/race prep area), we returned bikes and headed back to the city.
Allan and Benton went to the Airbnb to start working again, stopping at Kaiserzeit Würstelstand for some sausage (Benton got some excellent currywurst). Ryan, Elizabeth, and Roger didn’t have work, so they opted to go out to Schönbrunn Palace and then come back.
Today, Benton also learned that a few pretty important coworkers were leaving the company, which wasn’t really going to affect him, but he did feel a little validated in his thoughts of “this 4 days a week RTO thing may backfire,” knowing that this was part of the reason he had started looking to see what other jobs were out there.
Once everyone was back at the Airbnb, we went to get pizza nearby at Pizza Mari. Allan ordered the pizza with anchovies, olives, capers, and no cheese, proclaiming that he mainly wanted to try out fish on pizza (despite not really liking fish that much) 🤡. Allan did not like his pizza, unsurprisingly, but with help from others, it still got eaten.
Not much happened later in the night, but after work Benton, Allan, and Roger walked to a bar to see the second half of the FC Barcelona v. Inter Milan match (Allan, despite being a lifelong Barcelona fan, had to be dragged out of the house by Benton to go watch). The match itself was crazy: Barcelona came back from being down 2-0, to eventually going up 3-2 (at which point Allan was elated). Unfortunately (for Allan), Inter then scored in stoppage time to force extra time, ultimately winning in extra time and knocking Barcelona out of the Champions League in the semifinal round. Despite the disappointing result for Allan, it was still cool to watch in a busy bar (by Vienna standards: the bar near the TV was 90% full with no one standing).
After walking back, we all packed and slept, ready for our train to Prague the following morning.
