Servus
I’ve just come back from more jetsetting – this time a really good week away in Vienna, being all cultural. I’ve been to Wien before, back in 2001 when I was visiting a friend doing an ERASMUS placement there. I enjoyed myself then, and had been meaning to go back there ever since.
My Vienna photo gallery has many more photos.
I really like the whole cafehouse culture there – there are so many nice places to sit and enjoy a coffee and cake, or whatever. There are also many good, reasonably priced restaurants around. As Andrea said, the whole city is very baroque. It’s quite overpowering until you get used to it, the centre is all 5 or 6 story buildings with masses of ornate details, interspersed with some impressive imperial palaces. Topped off with an affordable and top-quality public transport system, it’s a nice place to be.
So. A brief summary of what we did:
Thursday
Andrea arrived in the morning by bus, and walked around the entire city. I turned up in the afternoon, and we went for a walk around the town, just orienting myself really. Took tram #1 around the ring a couple of times to see the sights. Took some photos of the Hofburg at sunset.
Friday
Went to Schönbrunn, wandered ardound the gardens. Many cheesy tourist photos. Went to the Naschmarkt for a kebab for lunch, then back to Schönbrunn afterwards! Lots of gardens and forest to explore, including some extremely tame red squirrels which are rather a novelty for us islanders.
Saturday
Visited Stephansdom, the enormous gothic hulk of a cathedral right in the centre of the city. Climbed up the North tower (the taller of the two) – it’s undergoing some restoration work at the moment, so the views are a little restricted, but it was good exercise.
Next, on for the traditional tourist excursion of eating Sachertorte, in Hotel Sacher – nice cake, nice coffee, only tourists there.
In the afternoon, we visited the Albertina – a couple of interesting exhibitions there, “from Goya to Picasso” was the main attraction, we also saw the exhibition of work by Piet Mondrian, but gave Anton Kolig a miss.
In the afternoon, we went to have a look at Karlskirche – a very impressive Baroque church in the Resselpark. Didn’t go in, but admired from the outside. From there, we went on the the Prater, which is a large park just to the edge of town, with a year-round funfair including the famous Riesenrad – not quite the London Eye…
Sunday
In the morning, we visited the Haus der Musik which I enjoyed a lot. There’s a straightforward history of the Vienna Philharmonic (which we skipped), then an impressive floor about the nature of sound with lots of interactive things to do. Next up was a floor with good displays about Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, Mahler, and the Second School. There’s an interactive thingy where you can conduct the orchestra (on a TV screen) and they do what you want! If you’re too bad, they start complaining though..
In the afternoon, I went to take some photos of Gasometer and Hundertwasser’s incinerator plant.
Monday
Monday was a bank holiday in Austria, so not much was open. We spent most of the day walking in the Wienerwald, the forest surrounding Vienna. We took the U-bahn to Heiligenstadt, then Tram N to Nussdorf, and walked from there up to Kahlenberg. We had fried things (Schnitzel for me, chips for Andrea) and then more Sachertorte and strudel in a cafe with a magnificent terrace overlooking the town. By the time we were ready to move on it threatened to rain, so we took the bus down again.
In the afternoon, we went back to the Resselpark to take some more photos (after the SD card on my Coolpix camera went on the blink), and then to the Donauinsel afterwards.
Tuesday
We went shopping for gifts in the morning, and wandered around town some more. We went from there to “Vienna DC” – a large block of grey on the north side of the Danube, home to the UN buildings, and some other corporate goodness. We were just passing through, on the way to the Donauturm. This is a 252m tall TV transmitter tower which one can take go up inside. More disturbingly, they do bungee jumping from it if that’s your thing. Excellent views over the city. After strolling through the donaupark for a while, we went back into the city, for a coffee in Cafe Central (probably Vienna’s most famous Kaffeehaus). After some more ambling through the city, we set off to find the Hundertwasserhaus, a block of flats in the same style as the incinerator. I don’t like Hundertwasser’s architecture – it looks like a child has randomly coloured bits of the building. We took a tram from there back to the Prater, and walked through the park for a while.
We went for dinner at the “Goulash Museum” (Schulerstrasse 20) which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly goulash-based dishes for around €5-10. Back to Cafe Central for a nightcap, and then to bed.
Wednesday
Proper leaving weather on Wednesday – raining hard. We got up early with the intention of going to get breakfast in town somewhere, but in the end ate too much chocolate before leaving and so just wandered aimlessly around for a while, slightly hindered by the fact that most museums etc only open at 10. We walked along Mariahilferstrasse, aiming for an aquarium there, but by the time we arrived it was getting late, so we just went to sit in a nice Kaffeehaus called Servus. I took the S7 from Wien Mitte back to the airport, and that was that.