Vienna und das kitsch

Greetings from Vienna! I HAVE ARRIVED.
After 12 hours of travelling and being on 2 planes, I finally arrived in Vienna.
So how is Vienna, and what do I think about it? Big, hot, and beautiful. The women are impeccably dressed, the buildings resemble wedding cakes, and good natured "Gruess Gott" or "good day" make me really feel like I am in Vienna.
Walking along the streets yesterday, I was struck by a certain duality. What duality? The sharp dissimilarity between kitsh and authenticity. You can get real Gucci glasses on the famous "Graben" square, or you can get fake Gucci glasses down the street from my apartment. You can listen to authentic musicians performing Mozart sonatas at the Opera house, or you can be led astray by people dressed like Mozart chasing you (a man chased me this morning) assuring you this is "the real thing". People may call this kitsh. The word "kitsch", originally in German, appeared in the XIX period and has been adopted by languages internationally. Milan Kundera, in "L'insoutenable legerete de l'etre", wrote a beautiful sentence about kitsch: "Le kitsch exclut de son champ de vision tout ce que l'existence humaine a d'essentiellement inacceptable". What does he mean by this? Whatever is kitsch, we think, is a sloppy copy of the authentic. But isn't there some beauty in a copy? Why are we so obsessed with authenticity?
So I am trying to embrace kitsh. Vienna is a city of paradoxes. Slender women dressed in Prada saunter along next to Arab women dressed in run down clothes pulling children along. Fruit and vegetables are either incredibly fresh (found only at specialty markets you have to know) or are wrapped so tightly at Billa, the Supermarket in Vienna, they make the Communist era goods look good.
I have a feeling a lot of people here don't feel like they belong. At the supermarket yesterday, a woman wearing the veil approached me timidly and asked, in even more broken German than my own, if the drink she held in her hand had alcohol. It was juice. When I assured her it did not contain alcohol, she gazed at the bottle confusedly. This woman probably lives in Vienna and can't even understand the ingredients, written in German, on a bottle of juice.
Vienna is offering me another image of itself on this trip. It is poetic, beautiful and stuck in the past, but I am seeing other parts of it too.One image, most particularly, struck me yesterday. Sitting on the subway, I looked at a couple near me. The lady, a petite reahead, wore a fluffy black tutu, a string of fake golden pearls, seven inch heels,crossing and uncrossing her tattooed legs continually. In her lap slept "Schnufli" as she called him, a tiny chihuahua. The man, huge and bearded, had his arm around her shoulder. They seemed, at least by the way they were dressed, to be fighting tradition, to be wild, to be "free". Together, they cried out to me: This is as much Vienna as the opera, or fancy clothes, or the famous chocolate cake, or a horse drawn carriage. You can't reduce Vienna to cliches. Vienna is the city of music and love, but it is a lot more. A duality of authenticity and kitsch, of tradition and modernity, of common sense and wildness. I love it.