Crowds everywhere (14.12.08)

Christmas is coming... Which means: there are many people everywhere. Everywhere = shops, streets, the city centre.
In Mariahilferstrasse (the main shopping street in Vienna) people took over the place of cars, as it seems the pavements are not enough for them. Thankfully, the street is closed to the traffic on all the Saturdays in December. Shopping turned into a nightmare: it's almost impossible to enter the small ones, the queues are extremely long, suddenly everyone's realised that it's time to buy some presents. Or stock some food etc. for Christmas.
Thankfully, only some days are that awful and the worse are the Saturdays.
Coming back to the crowds: less christmasy, but equally crowded was our Studenthouse last Friday. There was the biggest party of the year. The whole building turned into a disco, with different music on each floor (rock, house, the 70, 80, reggae, latino, techno...), dining rooms changed into dancing floors, kitchens into a bar and most people stayed in the corridors and staircases. On the most crowded floors (e.g. the 8th with rock music) you had to use your elbows and be a little aggressive to get through the corridor. Great number of students was constantly changing direction, moving between the floors, kitchens and dining rooms became soon very smoky and hot glasshouses, beer cans were lying about the floors. About one o'clock the music went suddenly silent. The police came, which didn't surprise me at all, because that happens quite often recently. But the most resistant ones had a (silent) party till 6 a.m. anyway. Well, why not...
And after the party... It's no use talking about it. I have never seen such a big mess before. Black sticky floors, beer cans everywhere, black kitchen... Rubbish near the entrance, in the lifts, in the porter's lodge... Yeah, students are able to do everything. Thankfully, no one waited till Monday, when the cleaners come and the big cleaning action begun in the morning. After few hours our floor was quite shiny again.