Injured and plagued in Vienna

Vienna is a very beautiful city. It was very clean, comfortable, and there were magnificent gardens, palaces and palace-like buildings everywhere. My host showed me all around the city, brought me to an amazing Pakistani restaurant (a buffet where you eat as much as you want and pay as much as you want), and took me to drink local wine in a part of the city with vineyards. We had a number of interesting conversations and quite the lovely time.

Now, this being said, on my first day I suffered a nasty spill. Since I had just arrived I was loaded up with my luggage, and what could have been just a little slip on the sidewalk turned into a pretty bad fall. My knees came crashing to the pavement and I didn't realize quite how bad it was until I was sitting on the tram and people were staring horrified at my legs. I reluctantly looked down to examine the damage and saw that my left knee cap had been completely skinned and blood was running down my leg. The other knee had also been skinned and bruised but not quite as badly. For the next few days I could barely walk at all and after that the pain was bad enough that walking around was not easy. But of course I still did it.

If this wasn't enough, I had somehow developed a terrible rash. It was worst on my hands but showed up on my legs and feet as well. I'm still not sure what caused it, but I think the sun may have had something to do with it. My hands were swollen, horribly itchy, and quite painful. I thought I had been stricken by the plague and was probably going to die.

With my hands and legs out of commission, my desire for adventure had pretty much been squashed. I was planning on WWOOFing (essentially doing farm work in exchange for room and board), then going off to Budapest, and then seeing where the road took me. But hobbling around and barely being able to use your hands is really not conducive to either farm work or adventuring on your own. So I said farewell to my plans for solo adventure and decided the best thing would be to join Lizzie and Carla as they toured around Italy.