September 12, 2022 to September 19, 2022
A week in Vienna (Sept. 12 to 19, 2022)
We wrapped up a pleasant week in Vienna. Neither of us had ever spent any time there so a week allowed us a good amount of time to sightsee and relax.
Our flat: we booked an AIRBNB flat and it wasn’t our most successful choice. It was in a perfect part of town, between the second and third rings, a little ways away from the touristy stuff but with plenty of excellent restaurants and coffee places. We were just off the street with all these camera stores so Dave was able to replace a lost lens cap (I don’t think I had mentioned that one.) The tram was also nearby and we enjoyed using it a few times. The flat itself was just a little too intense for us. The host had lived there a long time and she had never cleaned anything out so it was pretty claustrophobic for our comfort level. It was a bit like staying at your elderly, cool but eccentric aunt’s flat. Plus her directions to get to the flat was to ride up the lift to EITHER the fourth OR fifth floor (a bit like Harry Potters direction to arrive at track 7 and 3/4 for the Hogwarts express!). The bed was up these rickety stairs to a loft; it was very nerve wracking to crawl around your husband and down the steps in the dark without tripping. (It felt a bit like camping in a tent; you’re laying there for an hour in the middle of the night knowing you REALLY have to go to the bathroom, but you REALLY don’t want to get up and crawl out of the tent.) It was not exactly a fail, but not our best pick. Dave never took any pictures so you will just have to take my word for it.
The City: Vienna’s reputation as a lovely city is well-deserved, both on and off the bike. It’s an excellent cycling city, with cycleways everywhere and the most polite drivers I have ever been around, both to cyclists and pedestrians. When I am in a city like this it just drives me crazy thinking about how reluctant the US is to put resources into cycling infrastructure. It makes such a difference. The history of Vienna is rich and amazing, and we both feel enriched by how much we have learned about the story of an area that had felt kind of confusing for us.
The food and drink: excellent. Our host gave us some good recommendations in our area and we enjoyed those. We enjoyed a wonderful tapas place near our apartment. We went to a small, authentic but upscale Austrian place and ate two nights at the Italian place down the street (I Terroni) so we got our Italian fix of wine and pasta. We also found a French bakery and went there twice for breakfasts- which honestly, just made us want to go to France! Dave located the nearby Spar and he cooked one night -salmon, simple and wonderful- and we ate breakfast in the flat a few mornings for a change.
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The sightseeing: illuminating. Because we were there a whole week we were able to spread the sightseeing around- we are usually good for about one place or event a day. We attempted to do Rick Steve’s ring road tram tour on our bikes - which he suggests is possible but was too much multitasking for us. We kept getting lost or our podcast kept rebooting, so we eventually just pulled over at the WW2 Russian monument and listened to the whole tour and then rode our bikes around the ring road and remembered what we just listened to. One day we rode our bikes out and visited Schonnbrun Palace, with very ostentatious imperial rooms that are often compared to Versailles. We have a fairly limited tolerance for big fancy palaces (hey, give me an obscure hospital or Rupnik line any day!) but it it did help in putting history in perspective. Dave also visited the Kunsthistorisches museum of art and we walked down and visited St. Stephen’s cathedral. St. Stephen’s is the central point of tourism in Vienna and suddenly it was packed with tourists and many American voices. It was damaged in WW2 but was quickly repaired with an outpouring of funds. We had planned to do a tour of St. Stephen’s but we were discouraged by the crowds and the feeling we would be herded like sheep - so we didn’t.
We also listened to a piano concert in the House of Mozart - where Mozart played - and visited the House of Music, which covers the traditional Austrian great composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn) the famous Vienna Phiharmonic Orchestra, plus some weird physics about how music is made (which appealed to Dave more than me!)
The weather had turned cold, windy and rainy so this next week on the Danube Trail will be interesting.
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