Ladies of All Colors

Granted, it's usually someone else who has to point out that I should take a picture of this person or that, and it's usually those who are trained to recognize splotches of color in an otherwise dull atmosphere.

Take, for example, the lady sitting by the Neubaugasse metro stop, dressed in green, next to a green sign, reading a green book (!!) -- Andreas and I were sitting down having an ice cream while cars fumed behind us and shoppers squeezed by each other with their shopping bags on the ever crowded Mariahilfer Straße.

Or Dorothy in her red shoes, whom Karsten pointed out on a quiet side street in an utterly unaffordable and somewhat life-less part of the first district, who was waiting for someone to open the gate and let her in.

Then our lady in black underneath the unicorn statue on the corner of this concrete-slab apartment building: a delight of the mundane for those of us who look with amused condescension upon the industrial/working-class/decayed shadow of a city where bobos like myself visit as tourists and feel momentary relief from being surrounded by the pressures of the pristine. There are no unicorns in my parents' neighborhood.