Time to go again

We landed in Vienna today after a horror-show 24 hour trip from Sydney on Emirates Airlines.

Emirates once won a 'best airline' award. I don't think they'll be getting another anytime soon, unless it's the "most number of self-promoting and/or otherwise useless announcements that interupt the in-flight entertainment" award. They'd get that hands down. For seat size and grumpy staff, the Sydney to Dubai flight was the absolute worst. I've never had smaller seats, with my knees pressed against the backrest in front continuously for fourteen hours.

After Dubai we were on an older plane, there was more leg room and th staff were nicer.

We're over here so I can perform Best Man duties for my friend Peter and his wife-to-be Iris, both Austrian nationals living in Sydney. Peter is a marketing dude, very succesful, has the attention span of a small mountain goat and is pretty much defined by his impulsiveness. If he was a little younger and lived in America I have no doubt he'd be on ADHD medication. As it is, he's just exuberant and pushes the boundaries.

A lot.

We'd initially planned on sharing the cost of a hire car for the week both for the drive from Vienna to Saalfelden (near Salzburg) and for my drive with Jus to Ascona in Switzerland. We'd organised this with Iris, with the intention of getting a modest compact car.

On the day we left, we discovered Peter had hired a BMW X3.

That kind of cost was edging out of our realm of affordability, but Peter insited we only pay the drop off fee at Zurich airport when we returned it. On arriving in Vienna, he was disgusted to find he'd been 'upgraded' to a Hyundai, a brand he refuses point-blank to drive. Instead he pays for an upgrade to a 7 series and proceeds to careen through the Austrian countryside at up to 230kph.

At this point we decide to hire our own car to drive to Ascona. Even if I wasn't a little uncomfortable about driving so much money, I didn't feel like getting stuck with the speeding fines that inevitably meet Peter at every departure gate.

So now we're in Saalfelden, a lovely little Austrian town bounded by an incredibly dramatic mountain range on either side.