The most delightful thing just happened.
I was late for lunch, because it’s the week before concert week, and I’ve been making up the classes that I missed last week when I was sick. Like, really sick. Vomiting sick. The only kind of sick that would keep a music teacher from her students two weeks before the first big concert of the year. So I forfeited the dearest part of my day (lunch, of course) to rehearse with the students who missed their classes while I was busy vomiting.
Therefore, when I finally had a few minutes to breathe, the cafeteria was closed. I was devastated. Yes, I had vaguely suspected such an atrocity might occur, but it was a chance I had been willing to take. I knew I had to risk missing those tantalizing beef kabobs for the sake of the concert cause. And the children, of course. The children.
So there I was at the cafeteria counter, gushing with gratitude when the kitchen staff agreed to prepare a plate for me (bless them bless them bless them), and I saw a whole pile of kids sitting around the picnic tables outside, with nary a teacher in sight.
“This is perfect!” I thought. “I have someone to sit with while I eat my lunch!” And so I did.
I sat down, right in the middle of all the little ducklings. They were stunned, but pleased. I heard some of the children calling out each other’s names in a rhythmic sort of way, and I mused out loud, “Hmm! Sounds like someone wants to bake a cake!” And I started to sing.
Ha! Well, I exported myself from one continent to the other, and soon discovered that “learning French” is a bigger endeavour than I had expected – and that Le Petit Prince is not so little after all. 
She waved a cheery good-bye and floated away in her glass carriage, and I confess, I gulped a little. Me – find my way across the mountain and down to Lake Königssee, then catch the boat to Kessel, the bus to Berchtesgaden, and the train to Bad Reichenhall – without my GPS? Or Google maps? Without even my phone to look after me if I get lost? No cell service, no wi-fi, no homing pigeons… just me, a pamphlet, and a series of destinations? Me – the wanderer who can barely get from home to work and back again without an unintentional detour? Without a functioning phone? Not even one?
What I got instead was a whole lot of kitsch: bewigged men in velvet breeches handing out glossy pamphlets advertising cotton-candy concerts in gaudy palaces; church cantors with nasal voices, leading quartets instead of choirs; museum exhibits with nothing but facsimiles and gift shops; and Strauss. Oh, the Strauss. And not the good kind, either. Waltzen-Strauss. Vienna, you and I both know that there’s more to you than triple time, treble clef trinkets and musical ties. But where to find it?
