I spent the last two weeks in Austria. (Unfortunately my laptop power supply spent the last two weeks in Australia, so I've been offline.)

Vienna and Salzburg are lovely cities, but if you dislike second-hand smoke I would recommend staying away. The streets are carpeted with butts, and the air is heavy with stale smoke. They've finally got smokers out of restaurants, but bars are as smokey as ever. Austria (AKA Ashtray) is in a 30-year time warp as far as smoking pollution is concerned. That said, everyone here seems very kind and welcoming. And everyone seems to speak English well. Certainly besser als mein Deutsch.

I was surprised at the strength of religion. The country is predominantly Catholic, and there are churches everywhere. We went to a Mozart recital in a cathedral in Vienna. The acoustics were great because every inch of wall surface was covered in hideous statuary of suffering saints and fat flylng babies. The event was secular, but many people in the audience got down on their knees and mumbled to sky-fairy.

Catholicism is apparently losing ground in Austria, but Islam is growing because of immigration. I also learned that pagan religions are quite popular. A local government secretly paid a bunch of druids to bury crystals and magnets to reduce crashes on an expressway near Salzburg. And it worked! The local government proudly announced a major reduction in fatalities, and it had nothing to do with publicity about accident black spots, which perhaps encouraged people to slow down and take care.

I was feeling a bit depressed about all this mumbo-jumbo until I visited Vienna's natural history museum. All is now forgiven! The place is a temple to knowledge, reason, and science. There are entire huge galleries devoted to the history of the universe, the Earth, and life.