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.