How to avoid jet lag?

1. Austria is the only European Union nation that is not a member of NATO.
   
   
2. Austro-Hungarian Baroness Bertha von Suttner was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.
   
   
3. When the Turks fled the city of Vienna in 1683, they left behind a large quantity of coffee beans, thereby launching the great Viennese tradition of the Kaffeehaus (coffee house). Since the 19th century, the coffee house has been an indispensable social part of Viennese middle class and intellectual life.
   
   
4. Founded in 1752 as an animal menagerie by Emperor Franz Stephan, Vienna’s Schönbrunn Tiergarten is the oldest zoo in the world.
   
   
5. Death in Austria is big business, and the Austrian funeral industry is said to be largest per capita in Europe. Austrians plan quite openly for their eventual demise, discussing reserving burial plots, designing headstones, and joining Sterbeverein (“Death Association”) that ensures someone eventually shows up and pays the final bill. Coming back from an Austrian funeral, one is sure to hear that there was ein schöne Leiche (“a beautiful corpse”).
   
   
6. Austrian film directors Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann played an important role in the creation of Hollywood shortly before and after World War II.
   
   
7. There is a distinct possibility that Adolf Hitler was related to the Jews he tried to exterminate during the Holocaust. Samples of saliva taken from 39 relatives of Austrian-born Hitler in 2010 showed that he had a chromosome Haplogroup E1B1B1, which is commonly found in the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia as well as in Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. It is one of the major founding lineages of the Jewish population.
   
   
8. Vienna’s Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) is famous for rejecting a young painter by the name of Adolf Hitler. Of the 128 applicants that applied in 1907, Hitler was one of the 100 who failed. His entrance exam themes included “Expulsion from Paradise,” “Building Workers,” and “Death.”r
   
   
9. When Emperor Maximilian I founded the Vienna Boys’ Choir in 1498, he replaced castrati with young boys whose voices had not yet broken, creating one of the world’s most celebrated choirs.
   
   
10. The magic words for wine drinkers in Vienna are ein Achtel (an eighth of a liter), which is the most common serving size in Vienna.

BY EDWIN BRITO