€1 Lunches and Thrift Stores

Today was our adventure of thrift store shopping. I did hours of research last night to try to find the best possible places for us to shop. I came up with a list of about 12 places and narrowed it down to 5 this morning, set with directions and a list of which U's and buses to take. I also took the time to circle each destination in my transit book, which is a pretty amazing thing to have at all times. I'm over the fact that I look like a tourist, and am tempted to tell the locals who stare "hey, I live here too". But they probably don't speak English...
Anyways, the goal of the afternoon was to find a bomber jacket. They are very in style here and I wouldn't mind having one after a long night at the dance clubs, which they make very possible with a 1-2 euro coat check or rentable lockers. Walking down Wiedner Haupstraße, we almost missed the first store while focusing on avoiding the woman trying to shove some sort of text in our direction. A block and 3 minutes of blankly staring at eachother later, we decided to turn around and head back to the U. Sure enough, there it was in all it's glory, the sign reading "seconhand store". It was very exciting. This specific store, called Humana, was a little pricy for being all used clothing, but had an amazing Dirndl section. If you don't know what dirndl is, you should probably find out. Like, now. We were tempted to try things on, but figured our time would be better spent in a store where we could actually afford the clothes.
While walking to the second shop on the strategically planned list, we spoke of our hunger and about how much we wanted Kebap. As this conversation was happening, we passed a EuroSpar, which is another huge chain of supermarkets. In the window was an advertisement that I have seen nearly a thousand times in my month here for a €1 lunch consisting of a ham sandwich and choice of a coke or beer. We went for it and it was a fabulous buy. We took our sack lunches to go and walked two blocks to a small park to eat and to talk about how good it was for ONE EURO, also while being entertained by 3 old men playing bocce ball, or some form of it, in a gambling sort of fashion. After finishing our sandwiches and cokes, we continued our trek to thrift store number two. The second store was a REAL thrift store or at least it smelled like it. This would be the store where I would enter as a very unstylish American tourist and emerge as a super chic euro wannabe...pshh just kidding. But I did find my bomber jacket and boy, do I love it.
At this point, we still had two hours to kill before we needed to hop our bus to the gym so we decided to try out our third listed shop. The online reveiws said this store carried English books, so i was excited to see what they had for us. We were disappointed to find an extremely small shop with nothing but designer clothes, used but still way over priced, and childrens toys. On this note, we chose to call it a day and head home to prepare for practice.
After taking the U1 back to our beloved Reumanplatz and making our way to our 66A bus stop, we couldn't resist the temptation that is Tichy. Tichy the Eis Salon that is conveniently located at the most central part of our travel. We can't go anywhere without having to pass Tichy and thus have been there three times this week alone. Today I went with the Pistazien, or Pistacio, while Osier went with her usual boring coffee/chocolate (which is reeeaaaaally good in real life), which rounded out a day of well balanced meals. Nicht.
Wednesdays we help out at the U16 practice for our club so we left our apartment early and reached the school around 5:20. After an hour of individual layup practice with our two girls, we were in need of an energy boost before our own practice, so we ventured down the street to the corner market and grabbed a couple Red bulls.
After practice, dying for some healthy food, we were driven to the Schnitzelhouse, which we discovered is just down the street from our apartment and open very late. We ordered the biggest schnitzels possible and took them home to enjoy with a little CNN. Osier likes hers with the ketchup, I prefer mine with just lemon. We opened our boxes to find, not one schnitzel, but TWO schnitzels!!! Just what we needed. My self control allowed me to save about 6 bites for tomorrow, but nonetheless, I am convinced that we consumed about 13,000 calories today.
Fun Fact: "Austria" to the Austrians is Österreich. Naturally, every other country is called something different as well, which makes it really fun when discussing mine and Osier's desired travel plans in other parts of EU.