Vienna book haul, adventures + discoveries!

I’ve spent the last two days roaming the streets of Austria’s capital Vienna with my dad. I’ve bought books, ate some great food, went to the cinema and discovered a great bookstore – here we go!

The books I bought:

I’ve mentioned this non-fiction book called Sapiens in my last WWW Wednesday post already, but I thought I’d include it here as well. This book tells a brief History of Humankind starting with the evolution of the species Homo sapiens, to the Cognitive Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution and finally, the Industrial Revolution. I’m beyond excited to read this, as I’m trying to read a bit more educational books and my cousin who’s studying in Rotterdam told me every student has read this and has it on their bookshelves – so I’m very eager to devour this one to broaden my horizon.

Having a mother working in politics and my father teaching at the University, I’ve always been interested in politics and therefore, I knew the day would come where I buy myself a book like this one. How Democracies Die, my dad told me, was a huge success last year, by displaying how democracies fail because of leaders like Trump, what lessons history teaches us and what each of us can to to protect our democratic rights. Having chosen politics and economics as a main emphasis in school for my last two years, I thought this would be the perfect start for my studies. I hope this will clarify why people act in certain ways and how we could prevent further catastrophes by looking back at historical events and use them to wise up a little.

Last but not least, I bought myself a non-educational but young adult fantasy read to read solely because I love to read fiction. Enchantée has been hyped for the entire past year and I have avoided reading it ever since. I am trying to take this French book to my vacation to the South of France with my aunt next week to maybe increase my knowledge of the language (Salut!) a little. We’ll see.

Spending the day in Vienna:

Even though half of my family is from Austria doesn’t mean that I can’t love the most typical tourist dish in the whole wild world: the Wienerschnitzel. My mom is a huge fan of an Austrian author called Thomas Bernard (very famous in Europe!) who used to eat at this specific Cafe every day – the Bräunerhof, where we ate. It’s delicious there, so if you visit Vienna, be sure to go there and eat all the typical dishes!

Discovering Shakespeare & Company:

This bookstore is a solely English bookstore with bookshelves from the floor to the ceiling, cramped with all sorts of books from old classics to philosophy!

This is a sort of bookstore I’ve been searching for my whole life – not huge companies with stores in every town but a small section of good books where the shop owners can comment on almost every book because they’ve read them all!

This is a small shop in the centre of Vienna, so again, if you visit, give it a try!

Watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in the cinema:

As a fan of the director Quentin Tarantino and his previous movies like Inglorious Basterds, The Hateful Eight and Kill Bill + a fan of Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Margot Robbie – I was very excited, as you can imagine.

The atmosphere, pictures and the acting were 100% on point – the problem was, there really was no concrete story to find. It was again, Tarantino changing the course of history by telling the story of the murder of Sharon Tate, the wife of the famous director Roman Polanski. But that was at the end of the almost three hour film – otherwise, it had some funny jokes (great and educated humor), but otherwise, it was quite boring. Sadly.

This is it, friends. It’s a sort of diary entry-blog style-book haul- tourist day kind of entry, so I hope you enjoyed this different form of post! Have a great day & Happy reading!