Just enjoy your meal

You could help. It would take about one word, *Kamillentee*, maybe a gesture toward the pastry case, and the whole standoff at the counter would probably resolve itself in about ten seconds.

You don't.

Partly it's the coffee in front of you, still hot, still yours. Partly it's the fact that you've been in this city for exactly one confusing conversation less than this woman has clearly had, and yet you've at least tried to learn the language, badly, while she seems to be operating on the assumption that volume is a substitute for vocabulary. Mostly, though, it's just that it's not your circus. You came here for a quiet breakfast, not to referee.

The barista holds his ground admirably, repeating "chamomile" back at her twice with two entirely different, equally uncertain pronunciations, gesturing helplessly at a wall of teas that clearly don't have English labels. The woman sighs, loudly, the particular sigh of someone who has never once considered that the confusion might not be his fault. "Unbelievable," she mutters, to no one in particular, or possibly to the room, and turns on her heel toward the door, sundress swishing, leaving both her breadroll and her tea unordered and the barista looking faintly relieved.

The door swings shut behind her. The bakery, for a moment, seems to exhale.

You go back to your breakfast. It's good the coffee's strong, the bread's still warm, and there's a particular kind of contentment in sitting somewhere new with nowhere urgent to be, watching a foreign city go about its morning without needing anything from you. The barista catches your eye at one point, gives a small, weary shrug, and you offer him what you hope is a sympathetic almost-smile in return. Solidarity, of a sort, between the two people in the room who'd both rather this hadn't happened.

You take your time. There's no reason to rush, registration doesn't open for another hour, and the walk to campus is short enough that you could leave with ten minutes to spare and still make it. So you sit a while longer, coffee cooling slowly in the late-summer air drifting in through the propped-open door, and let yourself enjoy, for once, the simple fact of being somewhere new and asking nothing of it.

Eventually you pay, correctly, this time, counting out the coins slowly enough that the cashier doesn't have to help you, and step back out onto the street. Vienna in late morning is doing what Vienna apparently always does: looking effortlessly, infuriatingly picturesque, like it's not even trying. You start walking toward campus, in no particular hurry, already turning over in your head what you'll actually need to sort out once you get there.