Mirrors

So i have found a place here in Vienna where they have security checks that are more or less the same like in the living compounds in the KSA. I incidentally came across that place - the one here in Vienna, not the KSA... i was going to an electronics store picking something up. One of those small shops that give you almost 25% off just because you purchased online before coming there. Anyways. Got out of the shop. Saw a nice inscription on the building next to it. Was in Hungarian, that is why it surprised me. Old building - by which i mean 100 to 150 years old. Something about some Hungarian person that had been living in there. And next to it was another old building. I had been slightly aware of the security around it - a big fence and when you go into the first one by car you are stopped by these things that would even stop your regular tank. And then they have these mirrors to look under the car and check if someone forgot a bomb there. And of course lots of policemen standing around the whole area in general (in the KSA those were way-more-lazy-looking army men, waving all cars through most of the time...). But anyways, i am in Vienna, in what i like to call a free country so i basically ignored these guys and looked at the building. It had some interesting ornaments, well, not directly ornaments, but little statues and stuff. One particular head caught my interest. Funny face. So what i do, obviously, is the following: i take out my camera to take a picture of it. Of that head. Even though the zoom on my compact camera is not that strong, but good enough to get it. Lighting was also good, about five o'clock in the afternoon, beautiful sunset light. Just when i'm about to shoot, i mean, take my picture, i hear "sorry sir, no pictures here" in plain English. Caught me by surprise. I was so stunned that i actually put my camera back into my pocket instead of taking that picture. The voice was of a woman standing there, apparently she had come outside to smoke a cigarette. I took a closer look at the whole setting and saw the reason for all the fuzz: that building hosts the US embassy.
Really pissed me off, someone in Vienna telling me that i cannot take a picture in public. Fuckin' hell, i'm not in Lomography since '98 and back out of all those stupid places where public photography is forbidden in whole countries or people are scared of cameras so that someone in the middle of Vienna tells me that taking pictures is forbidden. So there you have it, one more thing that is bad about terrorism (besides all the obvious ones, like, people who think they have the right to torture and/or kill others because of some higher spirits or whatever madness). It created a ban on photography in my home city. Bollocks to that.

And since i did not make a photo of that funny head i will now leave you with some nice and harmless tourist pictures, taken here in Vienna, at the Strudelhofstiege, Schönbrunn and Steinhof.











Oh, and just in case you were wondering where you will find me during the next two years: i'll be working here in Vienna. And finally using my brains again, lots of it.