Snapshots from an early Spring

Spring really has sprung early this year, just as wrongfooting in its way as the late winter of the previous year, but somehow, people aren't really complaining. Of course I have been among the masses flocking to the parks and green places in and around Vienna, mostly before they have even *become* green again.

I am managing so far to keep up one hike a week, which is a pretty reasonable pace, considering that on several weekends I have then also completed smaller aimless wanderings on other days as well. Someone pointed out the other day that the temperature (in March) here (22 degrees) was the same as the average high for London for July... No wonder I have already started to feel a bit hot :-/

The shots I have selected for this blog are an extremely mixed bunch, featuring buildings, parks, people, woods, a solitary kite, and a sunset. As such they feel like they give a slightly more realistic view of my outside life than some photo collections, representing as they do a cross section of photogenic things I have been doing, rather than just one (though I think it important to point out I'm certainly not doing photogenic things so often as it probably seems from this blog!).

The first photo in the group I am particularly happy with, not because of any brilliance in composition but because it comes closest to capturing the magic of my favourite building, that much beblogged flakturm in the Augarten. My previous images captured some of the forboding bleakness of the place, but it is very important to realise how much of the flakturm's coolness comes from the fact that right in front of it is a tattered, reclaimed grassy bit which clearly once had flowerbeds, before it surrendered to the relentless logic of football and frisbee. Nowadays at any sign of good weather, and frequently without even that, hordes of viennese citizens take to the field to play and lie around. It is much more vibrant and less stuck up than the central viennese parks, lying as it does in a more immigrant neighbourhood. The clash between this and the sombre ruin of the giant Nazi fortresses is what gives the place its special *something*

Here's wishing spring comes to you too, soon! And if it isn't springing right now, here's the photo gallery to make up for it.

Der Tom