I have new pens from the hotel in Vienna. I hope they work well.

Now we are driving west from Vienna, in rolling plains with mountains in the distance in every direction.

Yesterday I spent in bed, except for breakfast in the hotel and a dinner outing to a Chinese restaurant by the hotel, after which I wrote and then while getting new pens was distracted to the hotel's piano player. He was very friendly, and we talked a bit and played our own compositions for each other. So all of Vienna I got to see was on the bus tour before arriving at the hotel.

Like Florence, Vienna has an old city whose walls are now a road. Vienna's old city was one-third filled by the buildings of the Hapsburg palace - when the walls came down the city immediately built a new, huge opera house as the most important new use of the free space. Then a theatre, and some buildings new museums, and government buildings.

Much of the city is for dreaming. The many palaces all have beautiful gardens - we briefly walked through a large rose garden. In front of city hall a large movie screen is set up so each night, weather permitting, the public can see an opera during the two summer months while the opera house is closed. Statues of famous composers abound.

The hotel room was a good one to be confined to. A doctor came to the room and again diagnosed tonsillitis (by now severe). He said the old medication was correct but I needed a much larger dosage, which I am now on. I slept as much as possible so the antibiotics could take hold quickly, and today I feel much better.

My one regret is that I have forgotten the Viennese Waltz since my days of ballroom dance classes, and re-learning this in Vienna would have been nice. Oh, well.

In Spain, the first letter of a licence plate told which city the car is from. In Austria this is done with a heraldic device. More wild upholstty and stuffed animals in cars too.