Vienna waits for you

 

Before telling you about Vienna, a quick update on Shieldaig Lodge. I posted my Review on Tripadvisor which elicited a long apology email from the manager. She thanked me for my detailed feedback. I’m imagining her gritting her teeth as she watches the horse depart through the stable door!

Thankfully no such dramas at our Vienna hotel which was excellent. I may even give them a Tripadvisor review too, although I’m put off by their gifts of chocolate tagged with “we look forward to reading your review” as we left. This is not the first time we have been encouraged to provide a positive review in this way. I understand why they do it but find it a bit distasteful.

I have to confess that in my school days history was my least favourite subject and I dropped it as soon as I could. Given how interesting I now find the topic I can only imagine that it was badly taught. When I think back to what Vienna meant to me in those days I’m reminded of a girlfriend who I dutifully took to see her favourite group Ultravox, Vienna being their signature track. I was more a fan of The Jam. To be fair Midge was pretty good although I was disappointed that Mary and Mungo didn’t show up. (That will likely mean nothing to Australian readers and possibly not many UK ones either!)

You might recall that Vienna meant nothing to Midge but around the same time Billy Joel had a more prescient lyric in his track of the same name:

“And you know that when the truth is told

that you can get what you want or you can just get old

… Vienna waits for you”

Which sounds like it may have been written for us. In fact, the lyrics are directed at the young:

“Slow down, you crazy child

you're so ambitious for a juvenile”

It’s a lesson I might have done well to learn at the time. Many young Australians spend time living in the UK and they always make the most of the opportunity to do minibreaks to European cities whilst they are there. Or they do the whole backpacking thing. For some reason growing up in UK, and being ‘so ambitious for a juvenile’, for me Vienna had to wait for 59 years. It was certainly worth waiting for.

To get there we encountered London Stansted airport on the first Saturday after schools closed for summer and the day after a global IT outage. Despite the operation being at full capacity, even at 5.30am, we navigated our way along what felt like rivers of people and took refuge in a surprisingly good café. The staff at the airport still had their sense of humour intact and diamond geezer Essex accents to guide us with.

Given my lack of historical knowledge I was largely ignorant of the trials and tribulations of Austria and the strength of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a result, I was not prepared for quite how grand the city would be. The historic area in the centre is stunning. Large and resplendent with fabulous heritage buildings around every corner. The civic buildings – palaces, museums, parliament and city hall - are of course the highlights. What was more remarkable was the quality and incredible condition of all the other buildings in the city. This is in part because many of them are not as old as you might think – the city has a reputation for ‘historicism’ ie making newer buildings look like older architectural styles. Nevertheless, the excellent condition of the buildings in Vienna contrasted with what we saw in Santiago, which has a lot of lovely old building that are clearly not maintained. I suspect the reason for the difference is partly about wealth but probably more so civic pride and community. I will leave it at that, for fear of further insulting any Chilean readers.

We made the most of the weekend by doing a cycle tour of the historic city, a kayak tour on the old Danube (there are four different Danubes in Vienna, its complicated!), a performance of Vivaldi's Four Seasons at the Karlskirche and a screening of Beethoven’s last three piano concertos at the Film Festival.

More memorable than all of that though was a walking food tour on the first morning. Not for the food (the first place we visited seemed to do a variety of different flavours of Spam) but for the political protest that was underway in the city at the time. The centre of the city was attended by far-right extremists, anti-Nazi protesters, police and tourists. I’d say roughly in the proportion 1:2:10:1000. So when the far right got a bit boisterous and set off a few firecrackers the tourists decided to start running and it felt briefly like things were getting out of hand. Our food guide continued to explain the history of the small sandwich bar we were frequenting and subsequently holed us up in an old wine bar whilst things quietened down. The local Viennese family who were with us on the tour explained that it is very rare to experience such civil unrest in Vienna, dismissing the extremists as ‘Little Hitlers’. We’d not dared mention the name!

Next stops are visiting friends and family in the UK then off on Le Shuttle to Paris. No chance of far-right demonstrations at the Olympics. Oh, hang on a minute…