Our adventure today took us to the Viennese equivalent of Tysons Corner mall.  It’s just outside the city, about the same number and style of shops, and even had many of the same shops.  Ironic, of course, that we’d move to Europe to go to a mall nearly identical to one that was blocks away from where were living, but we were in search of new phones, and that is where the search took us.  (It was to no avail on that front, but that is not the purpose of this story.)

Upon discovering that we were not, in fact, going to get our iPhones today (bummer!) we decided to treat ourselves (and our very patient eldest child) to some gelato.  I’ve had gelato before in the states — it’s basically like strong tasting, less creamy ice cream that everyone gets very excited about and I have no idea why.  I had not, however, ever had real, European Gelato before.  Wow.  Yummy, yummy, yummy.  Pretty much like ice cream, but with a great texture — kind of like a combination of really decadent ice cream and marshmallow fluff.  Kind of like frozen custard, but creamier.  So good.  Can’t wait to get more.

We also found another Starbucks today (that makes two so far).  Dan popped inside and did some reconnaissance — apparently, it’s exactly the same as home.  Same stuff, same prices (which means really expensive for that kind of food here).  But good to know it’s there, just in case I find myself in dire need of a grand soy chai.

Generally, we’re finding it’s harder to get stuff done than we had expected.  We want to make appointments to do some house hunting, but to make those calls, we need phones.  We’ve been trying for two days to get phones, but it’s proving trickier than we expected:  the stores are not open American business hours, and when we finally got to an open store today, Dan first had to come back to get his passport, and then when we went back, we realized that we need paperwork (proof of residency) that we don’t have yet — partly because we haven’t been able to call the people at Dan’s work who we need to get in touch with because we don’t have phones.  It’s all a little frustrating — but only a little.  That seems to be just part of life here:  the pace of things is a little slower, and we aren’t really expected to be firing on all cylinders yet.  We’ll get it sorted out.  In the meantime, we need to get on with normal life stuff:  unpacking, grocery shopping, laundry . . . things like that.  Even big adventurers have housework to do.