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.

(My Other Blog)

I just came back from a week in Brussels, working at the BP/Innovene/Solvay site – I’ll write about my work separately.

Due to some Seafood Expo, we were staying in a youth hostel in Anderlecht, called G̩n̩ration Europe Рnice hostel, decent breakfasts, fairly rough area of town. A particular highlight was rolling up there in a BMW executive car! Last night spent in the Hilton Brussels Рwhich was pretty much as expected for a 5 star business hotel. Excellent breakfasts.

Brussels is a great city if you want to eat out – there are so many nice restaurants, and many fit in the “decent, reasonably priced” category which is so hard to find in the UK. I especially enjoyed Le Paon Royal – an excellent bistro on the square by Église Sainte Cathérine. I had Chateaubriand with frites, which was excellent.

We also liked a noodle bar called Suki, on rue des Poissonners (near the Bourse). It’s a tiny place, but serves up really good noodles, rice, and pad thai – nice and cheap and very tasty.

The public transport system in Brussels is pretty good – a comprehensive network of trams and busses, which seemed to mostly run on time. The route to the site at which we were working was a mass of roadworks, which caused some delays (and shaken fists from the locals), but that was the exception rather than the rule. It is considered bad luck to have to wait more than 5 minutes for a bus during the daytime.

All up, a very enjoyable trip. More photos, as ever in my gallery

Writing about: my world, 14/04/05, every nightmare begins as a dream

create your own visited countries map

Shot in Saarbrücken at the weekend. I rather like it.

As ever, there’s more on My Photography Website

Germany.

10cm of snow falls overnight.
Life goes on. People drive a little more carefully. Trains run, traffic keeps flowing. Nothing much changes.

UK.

0.5cm of snow falls, and doesn’t really settle
Chaos. Roads gridlocked.

Why?

In UK airports, one is faced with many crowded and massively uncomfortable chairs, designed specifically to prevent people from lying down on them when faced with an extended wait in the airport.

In Frankfurt airport, as well as comfortable chairs, one is also presented with:

at strategic locations, for just such times.

I’ve never seen a children’s play area in a UK airport. In Frankfurt you have a 3-story spaceship (with ballpen in the bottom):

I think this all comes down to the way that customers are seen. UK airports seem to have been designed as if the passengers are an inconvenience (“Don’t you know we’re trying to run an airport?!”), whereas their needs are designed-in much better in Germany.

Writing about Start from Christoph Ungemach’s weblog

A new member of the warwick blogs community just posted for the first time, and got me thinking (again).

A translation of what he says for those who can’t speak german:

Following an information meeting about e-Learning, I have been convinced to start a weblog. For international students especially, this is an opportunity to describe what’s going on; to give friends and family an insight into life here on campus.

Apologies if my german is a little rusty.

But this made me realise how much I take the ability to stay in touch with people all over the world for granted.

• More or less everybody I know uses email, and many of them use some kind of online chat thing.


• Thanks to fierce competition in the international calls marketplace, I can talk by phone to people in most countries for little more than it costs to call within the UK.


• Ryanair¹ and friends have made short trips abroad a real possibility.

And I think about how much harder things must have been, even when I started uni. The internet was yet to explode onto the mainstream, international calls were expensive, and airfare (within europe anyway) cost on average £200, compared to about £50 that I seem to end up paying with Ryanair. And that was when money was still worth something :-)

Several of my friends have done erasmus programmes, both brits travelling abroad and foreigners I’ve met here. All have relied on the internet to stay in touch, and then used cheap calling cards for occasional phone calls.

I guess it’s a gain to be able to stay in touch so easily, but I wonder if it’s harder to fully immerse yourself in a new culture when you are so easily connected to home?

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¹I hate flying Ryanair, with a passion. Given any alternative, I’d rather fly with a real airline. The Airline Network is particularly good for finding reasonably priced fares on real airlines.

I’m half swedish, but I’ve essentially lived in the UK for my entire life. I don’t speak swedish well, although I am in the process of learning now. I’ve just come back from a holiday travelling around the south, and it strikes me just how much I like the place. Perhaps it’s partly to do with the fact that I’ve always been there on holiday, but I just seem to connect with the country on a lot of levels.

I like the sense of style – mostly very understated and simple, but not plain.
I like the friendliness of the people.
I like the fact that I can leave my bike in a city without being worried about it. I like that I can leave my gear in my tent for a day.
I like the way that cycle lanes are an intrinsic part of city planning.
I like meatballs with lingonberry sauce.
I like deep fried camembert with cloudberry jam (evil, but sooo tasty).
I like being able to sit on an island in the middle of Stockholm, looking over the water towards the tivoli gardens, and it feeling like the middle of nowhere.
I like the way that there are cold winters and warm summers.
I love the light.
I like the sense of space. The population density is far lower than here, but even in the cities there is more thought given to space than you find in the UK.
I love the sound of spoken swedish. (yes, even my family’s country-bumpkin skåne accents (Um geesh de börk börk!) ;-)

I don’t know if I’ll ever end up living there, but I’m not averse to the idea.