This suitcase is the first piece of named anything I have acquired, a Rick Steves suitcase with straps AND wheels, very likely to fit into overhead bins. I bought it because Steves has posted good travel advice which I studied before I came to Europe.  Advice in quantity, available in advance, is one big difference between traveling in 1972 and traveling now. Steves' suggestions saved me hours of misery and worry. He writes for a somewhat different traveler than I am: richer, less interested in sustained local contact, with less time and broader ambitions (Europe in two weeks). Most of what he says makes great sense. For a 60+ person like me, I'd tweak his advice a bit, mostly changing emphasis. The major problem I face traveling is that new situations bring out my obsessive compulsive tendencies. I have things to be afraid of, things not to lose, and so I recheck and worry and otherwise torture myself too much. So, if I were writing his books, I'd aim them at diminishing obsession:

1. Your best friend is a long lanyard. Keys keep mattering.

2. The pants with pockets that zip make many worries go away, and money belts don't fit well around some people.

3. An international drivers license means you can leave your passport somewhere safe.

4. One needs a small plastic bag for the usable coins and a box in one's room for the unusable coins; otherwise, one loses one's pants and one's dignity at approximately the same moment.

5. Weekly tickets on public transportation and yearly ticket to  museums make one feel approximately like a Hapsburg.

6. One should always have an emergency lunch, a jacket, and some water.

These are small matters. The big matter is: one can plan now for trips in a way one could not easily before: see each step in advance, arrange to meet people, check out the train regulations. For adventurous people, that may not matter much. A night in jail, a night sleeping with goats, emergency evacuation -- these are just other names for fun. But, for some others of us, the belt and suspenders type people, anxiety really does wreck the experience. We take our adventure in carefully measured spoonfuls, or not at all. For us, people like Steves make  travel possible. The suitcase isn't bad either, though the one-directional wheels keep it from rolling sideways, which it sometimes needs to do. 

This is one of two kangaroos in the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna. Kangaroo: an animal that moves by bouncing, also, an animal remarkably out of place here. I think that's a way to begin: I have bounced back more than 40 years, to a city I lived in as a student, interacting now with colleagues who could be my children. And I am interestingly out of place: more hopeful than those around me, and also much messier. More differences will present themselves. 

I have quite a nice enclosure: a room in a sunny apartment in Meidling, two stops from Schönbrunn, in a changing neighbourhood with many immigrants that seems not to have been worn much by the strangers and their ways. 

Across from me is the local version of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship; down the street is the Love-Kino. Neither seems to be getting much business, and neither spills out onto the street. A furniture factory is somehow buried in one of the adjoining buildings; one knows that only by the sign. A strangely diverse mix of activities coexist without taking account of each other.

I have the job: to document, to make public, stories about food, and any other stories that come my way or that I can scare up. I am supported but not salaried, so have just that much autonomy. Unlike the first time, I have some credentials: a television show, a website, a PhD, a history of having done things. This changes my introductions to people, as does also my age and my relative self-assurance.

I'm not sure it's good to keep trips to oneself. The relatives' slideshows had a point. To travel is an advantage, paid for partly by the work of others, and one should make something useful of one's trips, for those who couldn't go this time. That's partly the point of writing this. Also, I am a bad rememberer, a bad record keeper, and the more attempts I make at records, the more likely some reminder will be there when I wonder later, "What was that exactly, that I did back then?" I am being lucky right now, relative to other phases of my own life and relative to the lives of my friends, and that should be acknowledged.