Scooby Dooby Doo Doo!

It's right there in bright red ink on my map of Vienna. Over one of its residential streets, there are big letters calling it Dog Shit Boulevard.

For starters, I will be using euphemisms for the rest of the post, but I wanted you to experience the same shock that I felt when I first looked at the hostel's tourist map. But that's not the only place you find "dog poop" dropping into the map. On the back, it says there's a dog-doody park behind the Prater merry-go-round and that Danube Island is a "heaven for joggers, cyclists, skaters and dog [doo-doo] spotters."

Dog doo-doo spotting? Is that anything like whale watching?

Something this hot had to be dug into, so to get the scoop, I turned to the authority on such matters — The Poop Report (if you think I'm kidding, click on the link). According to the cheeky fellows over at the Report, there is a serious uproar among Vienna's residents about doggy droppings. In fact, in May 2006, residents presented the city government with 157,000 signatures demanding that they provide better clean up and tougher penalties for these four-legged dumpsters. With the exception of one politician who wanted to DNA test dog droppings, the rest of the city government just sat on it. The citizens then sought other ways to shame the city into correcting the problem. For example, they urged people to, and I quote, "count the number of Vienna sausages they see in the space of five minutes" and compile the data into a census for the city. How bad has the situation got? Someone accidentally killed his neighbor recently in a fight over dog poop!

The city is finally doing something about it, from installing plastic baggie dispensers at parks to putting up posters like the one below. Ultimately, though, I imagine calling attention to the problem in tourist maps also shames the city and its citizens into lending a hand. Seriously, it can't help your property value to live on a street dubbed Dog Crap Boulevard, and certainly the tourism offices don't want to be asked questions about this. To that extent it's definitely working. The photos above are from the actual Boulevard, and there wasn't a single Vienna sausage to be found.

The problem is getting better, but it's not fixed yet, so follow these words of advice when walking around Vienna. If you see a beautiful building you want to admire, do what NYC tourists do and simply stop in the middle of the sidewalk and gaze. Otherwise, if you're walking and gazing at the same time, you never know what you'll stumble into.