Lupita Nyong’o has been continuing her blogging for us about her experiences with MTV Staying Alive at this year’s International AIDS Conference in Vienna.

Check out this post in which she gives us a rundown of her first impressions of Vienna, Nick’s ability to sleep all the way through a 10 hour flight and debating what it really takes to help change young people’s sexual behavior?

We are finally in Vienna! We arrived yesterday afternoon after a testy 10 or so hours on Egypt Air. I say testy because we had to be at the airport at 1:30 a.m. for 4:30 a.m. departure. That meant no sleep for the night of course. And then the flight was 1 hour late. And then they fed us inedible food, including a wobbly block of egg and some overcooked pasty pasta. And then we had a rocky final landing. But who’s complaining: we’re in one piece in Europe’s most beautiful and most clean cities! (Egypt Air gets an E for Effort.)

Nick slept all the way, only waking up to drink a cup of juice at my prompting – not even a bathroom break! He is evidently a very absorbent man. When we arrived in Vienna, we were both moody (plane sleep is really no sleep) and excited. Everything went surprisingly smoothly at the passport control desk; they didn’t so much as say hello – it was just stamp and go. Once that was through, we found our sense of humor again, taking pictures by the baggage claim belt – what dorky tourists!

The drive from the airport was pleasant, in a slick black Mercedes Benz taxi, no less (in these parts of the world, Mercedeses are common cars for cabs). Our driver, Michael, played the voluntary and welcome role of tour guide. We learned that Vienna has about 1.7 million inhabitants and is home to

Everything here is so clean! Nick and I are wondering to ourselves if and when Kenya will get to this point, where streetlights are available, functional and reliable, and trash belongs only in bins…

The hotel we’re staying at is right across from the United Nations – Vienna is currently the world’s 4^th “UN city” after New York, Geneva and The Hague, by the way. The hotel is sophisticated and simple, of mainly black and white décor with red accents. I just love staying in hotels – they make you feel important and yet incognito.

I finally met some of the MTV Staying Alive team that I have been communicating with via email for months. It’s so good to finally put faces to names. We had an easy afternoon at the hotel with Siobhan (you pronounce it “Shi’von”) and Julie, who filled us in on what’s what at the AIDS Conference. We caught up over a Viennese steak burger and fries. I wanted to try something more local, like the wiener schnitzel that cab-driver-Michael had told us about, but after considering how exhausted I was feeling, I decided that experimentation would have to wait for another day.

I blacked out for about 2 hours before we went out for a lovely late-night dinner with the MTV and BET crews. There was a lot of industry talk, both about TV and HIV/AIDS. One question that we were turning around was what does it really take for the media to help change young people’s sexual behavior? How I feel is that you can’t force education down anyone’s throat, you can only provide it: A mother feeds her child but it is ultimately up to that child to do the swallowing – I’m sure there’s an old African saying to this effect! I mean it’s great that we have different media campaigns out there but we shouldn’t rely on just that to make the difference. At the end of the day it’s up to that man in that mirror, right? Now sing it with me…

TO DO LIST

Register for conference

Explore conference

Find out how female condoms really work

Eat wiener schnitzel, gulasch and tafelspitz