IntroductionInstead of a chronological account of our time in Vienna I'm going to organize this by themes, in the hope that it will be more interesting and more useful (should anyone happen to find this blog).
We landed at the Vienna airport Friday morning, and flew back out Monday evening, so we had nearly four full days to enjoy. I had only been here for a one-day business trip a year ago; Anja auditioned for some artists' agencies a number of years ago, but was only here for a day or two, and mostly concerned with singing, not with sightseeing. Our previous impressions were thus very limited.
Our hotel, the Hotel-Pension Shermin Apartments proved an excellent choice. The room was modern, clean and relatively spacious, and most important – extremely quiet. The personnel was friendly and helpful. It's located only a five-minute walk from the subway station Karlsplatz, and directly next to a tram stop.
Before our trip we ordered a Vienna Card for each of us online. This includes an unlimited 72-hour transit pass (which is not valid to/from the airport), and a number of coupons offering rebates on museums and shopping. My advice: if you're not a relentless museum junkie just by a transit pass separately. It's much cheaper, and many of the museums offer combination tickets with others that save just as much money. The public transit system is excellent – most of the subway lines operate in a five-minute rhythm throughout the day, there are many tram lines which also have a frequency between five and ten minutes.
We were fortunate with the weather – Friday was perfect, Saturday nearly so, there was just a brief downpour Sunday afternoon (but little sun thereafter). Monday was colder and showery.
The VienneseThere's a widespread prejudice that the Viennese are unfriendly and arrogant, most notably the waiters. We found this absolutely untrue. Everyone should spend an hour in the famous Cafe Landtmann near the Burgtheater.
These are the most famous waiters in Vienna. I suppose their manner could be misinterpreted as arrogant, but actually they put on a wonderful performance, with wry humor. When a lady put her damp umbrella on a wooden shelf, the waiter asked her with courtesy way to place it in an umbrella stand instead, showing her many potential resting places for her umbrella, but please, not the expensive woodwork!
Everywhere else we found only friendly, helpful people, whether in our hotel, in museums, in cafes, or in shops. Perhaps the tales about rude Viennese were started by German waiters to deflect from their own frequent lack of courtesy.
The Food
Vienna is a city with an international face. I've rarely seen a higher concentration of Japanese restaurants in Europe or North America. And of course there are plenty of Chinese, Greek, Hungarian, Italian and just about everything else restaurants. Oh yes- there are typically Viennese restaurants too.
A highlight for foodies is the Naschmarkt (literally Snack Market). This is Vienna's answer to Munich's Viktualienmarkt, or Seattle's Pike Place Market.
Stretching in two long, crowded rows along the Wienfluss, a small stream, it offers almost anything you could want to eat: cheese and salami from Italy, spices from the Middle East, produce from all over the world, meat and fish, falafel, hummus, marinated feta cheese. There are many small restaurants and cafes offering everything from Vietnamese food to traditional Viennese.
We had some of the best falafel I've ever tasted there. Our other dining experiences in Vienna included a wonderful Italian restaurant near our hotel (
Ristorante da Gino e Maria) and several Viennese restaurants. We weren't overwhelmed by the latter – the cuisine is pretty similar to Bavarian. I highly recommend avoiding the big touristy restaurants in the inner city and looking for smaller places in the neighboring districts. One place we liked is called Ubl.
The DrinkThe staple of Vienna is called a Melange – this is very close to cappuccino, but is apparently made with a milder coffee roast than cappuccino. We tended to punctuate our wanderings through the city every hour or two with a melange in a street cafe; we never found a bad melange (by contrast I've had tasteless cappuccino in Italy and elsewhere). Most places have it available in decaf as well. Of course regular coffee is available, and Viennese mocha is very good.
Wine is actually produced within the city limits of Vienna, and local wines are widely available. These tend to be fairly light white and red wines. The best place to try local wines is at one of the Heurigen, especially those in the wine-producing areas like Grinzing. See the separate section on Grinzing.
Beer is also prevalent, but there are not as many smaller breweries as in Germany. Confusingly, beer is served either in a Krügerl (a half liter) or a Seidl (a third of a liter).
GrinzingWe visited Grinzing Friday night with several goals: have dinner at a Heurigen, see the Beethoven museum in Heiligenstadt on the way, find Mahler's grave in the cemetery in Grinzing, and see the Mahler house in Grinzing.
There are at least two easy ways of getting to Grinzing from downtown – we chose to take the U4 subway to Heiligenstadt. Beethoven fans will know that Heiligenstadt is the former village he often spent his summers in; the place he wrote the famous “Heiligenstadt Testament” in the summer of 1802, when we was driven to despondency by his increasing deafness. The house he lives in is now a museum. From the description in our guide book this looked like a pleasant walk, followed by a short walk onward to Grinzing. When we left the subway station though we were dismayed by the surroundings; it was as if we had stepped out onto somewhere around N. 145th and Aurora Ave. in Seattle. We quickly decided not to try finding the Beethoven House on foot; instead we jumped on a bus headed to Grinzing.
I don't know I missed in the Beethoven museum, but taking the bus on to Grinzing was surely the right decision. The road to Grinzing was mostly through a modern suburb with little charm. Only when we approached the center of Grinzing (now within the Vienna city limits, but once a village) did the scenery improve. We got off the bus and tried to find the Grinzing cemetery – and Gustav Mahler. From the maps we had it looked as if it should be simple – but we walked in the heat for a good half hour, increasingly feeling our 4:30 AM rising that morning. We asked a gentleman passing by - “Just 100 meters straight ahead, then left.” We walked more than 100 meters and found no trace of a road or path to the left. Finally we gave up and decided to look for a place to have dinner, of course a Heuriger.
A Heuriger is a Viennese tradition, a rustic restaurant serving simple dishes and its own wine, often with live music. The name comes from “heurig”, referring to this year's wine. The Heurigen in Grinzing tend to be somewhat touristy, but Grinzing is perhaps the easiest “Heurigenort” to reach with public transit. As we approached one restaurant recommended to us, a bus load of tourists piled into the courtyard ahead of us. We decided to try something else. Nearby we found another place (there are many in Grinzing!) that was already pretty crowded, but we found a table outside. It was a delightful dining experience, mostly because of the atmosphere and the wine – the food and service were average at best. Obviously we didn't find Mahler's house either.
We took the tram (line 38) from Grinzing back to downtown, which was more pleasant than taking the bus back to Heiligenstadt. We were left to wonder what Heiligenstadt and the vicinity must have looked like 200 years ago when Beethoven was there.
Zentralfriedhof (Main Cemetery)Vienna used to have many small cemeteries closer to town, but in the mid 19th century they were rapidly running out of room. Planning for the future, the city opened one central cemetery on the outskirts of town, hoping to cover all needs for the foreseeable future. The Zentralfriedhof is the second biggest by area in Europe (nearly 2.5 square km), and the largest by “population” , with close two 3 million registered burials. Most of the older cemeteries were closed to new burials. Originally heavily criticized as unattractive and too far from town, today the cemetery is reachable via tram and light rail, and has a wonderful mix of trees and open, meadow-like areas.
We took the light rail line to get there (the S7, the same line that goes to the airport); the station is on the far side away from the main entrance, yet close to an open gate. This area of the cemetery is the “Old Jewish Cemetery” - fascinating and profoundly sad. The grass grows long, in places head-high (I've been told that this is a Jewish tradition – does anyone know whether that is true?) Most of the graves here are from the epoch around World War I – there are many family graves, doctors, lawyers, teachers, shop owners, and many who were killed in action – dying for a country which killed most of their families 25 years later. I don't want to start a discussion here about the Nazi regime in Austria – I just found much to reflect on. Many of the headstones have been restored recently – since 1991 a society named Shalom has restored and repaired headstones and graves.
The Zentralfriedhof has a monumental church, and near the church several sections of Ehrengräber (Graves of Honor). Here can be found the graves of Beethoven and Schubert (moved from other, older cemeteries), Brahms, the complete Strauß family, Schönberg, other musicians, and many famous politicians (local and national), actors, writers and others. I was moved to find the grave of Leonie Rysanek, a famous opera singer with whom I once worked at Seattle Opera.
The only cemetery I've seen that compares with this is Père Lachaise in Paris – but there the famous graves are scattered everywhere, in Vienna they're compactly organized. I found it ironic that many Viennese local politicians are buried in such proximity to Beethoven, Nestroy and others – the former are probably mostly forgotten (quick – who was on the city council of Seattle in 1957?), the latter will never be forgotten.
ComposersProbably no city can claim so many composers of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries. The list of graves above bears witness to this, and walking around town you see plaques everywhere proclaiming “Mozart lived here”, “Beethoven lived here”, or more likely, “Here stood a house where Mozart lived”. There are museums for Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, Strauss, Mahler, and probably other composers I'm not thinking of at the moment. For the first three there are at least two museums or memorials apiece. We visited the house Mozart lived in for the longest period in Vienna, during which he composed “The Marriage of Figaro” among other works. This was a charming museum, giving a good feeling for how he lived, with household items similar to things he might have owned. I found this much more interesting than the Mozart Birth House in Salzburg.
We also visited the Pasqualati House, where Beethoven lived at several different times (he moved very frequently). He composed his Fourth, Fifth and Seventh symphonies here, “Fidelio”, and other works. The museum is small (and you need to climb a narrow staircase to the 5th floor), but features a Broadwood piano similar to the one he owned, and a few miscellaneous objects he owned (a sugar box). Definitely worth a visit if you're a Beethoven fan, but not as impressive as the Beethoven House in Bonn.
The Inner CityIf Johann Strauss went for a walk in the Innere Stadt, he’d probably recognize it, but Beethoven or Mozart would not. The inner city is a roughly circular area bounded by a ring of streets where in Mozart’s day the city walls stood. Most of the buildings seem to date from the late 18th to the late 20th century, with the exception of the many churches, most of which are even older. And of course the Habsburgs’ city palace, the Hofburg, which evolved over centuries.
The main shopping mile, which runs roughly in the form of a cross from near the State Opera (an impressive building!) with interruptions north to the Danube canal (not very blue), is larger than in any German city I’ve been in, and is completely interchangeable with any of them. You see the same stores here you see anywhere in Europe (or much of the world) – H&M, Douglas, Benetton, C&A and more. If you’re looking for “Old Vienna” it’s easy to be disappointed, but if you look hard, especially to the north and east of the Stefansdom, you can find some old narrow alleys. Confusingly, practically every street in Vienna is called “Gasse” (Alley), but most of them are streets in any sense of the word.
The inner city is dominated by St. Stephans (Stefansdom), a mighty cathedral. Unfortunately it tends to be overrun with tourists, making it difficult to wonder at the architecture inside and out in peace.
I was planning to write about Schönbrunn, the Prater and more, but this post has already reached epic proportions. So I'll break off here, and hopefully continue soon. Some pictures will be posted on my Facebook profile for my FB friends, and I'll post more to
Flickr.
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