Travelling Santa

There is an elderly man clothed as Santa Claus meandering around Vienna in a red power scooter. On the front of the scooter's basket is a handwritten cardboard sign that reads "Santa says please do not smoke indoors with children! Give them clean, healthy air."

I first saw this man right outside the Irish pub nearby our apartments on Kandlgasse. I thought little of him at first, thinking he was just some eccentric, probably homeless, old guy, so I avoided him.

A couple weeks later, I saw him as I was walking past Albertinaplatz. He was at the Bitzinger stand, likely ordering a sausage. By this point I was curious, but I didn't investigate any further.

A few days before our program ended, I happened upon the Vienna YouTube channel and I scanned through the videos. I was surprised to find a 25-video series: a Travelling Santa advent calendar. You can find the series here.

Whoa.. This isn't just some weird dude in a Santa costume -- he's a Viennese institution on his own rite, much like San Francisco's late Bushman. The Vienna tourism website even has an entire page dedicated to him. His name is Micheal Klein and has been travelling the world as a hitchhiker since 1953, when we was only 13 years old! Today, at the age of 74, he finally settled in Vienna, the (for now) terminus of his journey. Pretty cool.