Graz–Feb. 13, 2025

I took the bicycle out to Shopping Nord 🇦🇹 (a shopping center on the north end of town, as you might have gathered from its name). On the way there, I saw this poster:

And now? Together with consideration.

Then I happened to look up and to the left, and am I glad I did: I saw this church on a steep hill.

A close-up of part of the church

I bought a pretzel at the mall from Wagner Brezen 🇦🇹. It looks like it’s not fully baked, but it is, and it tasted really great. Not overly salty or too crunchy.

And I bought some flavored yogurt (Strawberry/Raspberry, Pear/Banana, and Peach/Apricot) at the Billa+ supermarket. This is the cheap house brand.

Tell me you’ve never lived in Europe without telling me you’ve never lived in Europe.

I wandered over to Threads from Instagram today. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Threads is largely an open-air sewer, filled with nutjob conspiracy cranks. Here’s someone’s post in reply to someone asking how people in Europe would say someone is 1.9 meters (or 190 centimeters) tall:

This is the one area where imperial makes a lot more sense. 190cm? What are we, scientists? That takes so long to say and is much harder to visualize than 6 rulers.

My response (yes, I know it won’t make any impression on the original poster, but I had to say it anyway):

I'm an American living in Europe, and nobody has to use a calculator to figure out distance or weights. Metric is used for everything; you just get used to it. What's my height? It's 165. Everyone knows that's shorter than average. My weight? 59kg. Everyone knows I am a bit heavy for my height. The mall is about 1 km away? Oh, that's about 15 minutes walk (at my normal pace).