Vienna looks very flat from the air and much greener than Istanbul. Climate is cooler as we step off the plane and 
into the transit bus to the airport terminal. We notice that very suddenly the language around us has changed from Turkish to German and even though we were surrounded by darker skinned (well tanned) people in Istanbul they suddenly all seem a lot lighter here in Vienna. The airport toilets are good (read: better than Istanbul where you don’t want to touch anything) but still falling behind the Triple-A standard of Singapore International Airport.
We have 7 nights in Klosterneuburg – an outer suburb/township of Vienna. We have been advised by various friends that any more than 2 nights in Vienna is too long but hey we have free accommodation with a close family friend so how bad can it be………
Anna who we stayed with was great. She met us at the Vienna airport to guide us through the bus to rail to bus back to her car and then finally to her compact apartment in Klosterneuburg-Weidling. While the weather is presently balmy and humid the apartment building recently upgraded all of the external windows to triple glazing. These windows are very thick and hint at how cold it gets here in the winter time.
Anna already has an itinerary in mind for us which results in a gruelling first day of trekking round the city on foot. We visit statues, palaces, churches and museums galore and I find it not only hard on the feet but also hard on my head taking all this colour in – definite sensory overload! I realise that I am not really cut out for too much of this type of thing. We finally stop for lunch around 3pm and we are starved. So we sit down at an outdoor restaurant in the very centre square of Vienna and enjoy a beer and some fine Viennese food.
Over the following days we visited more palaces, churches and museums along the way seeing many more statues of men, women and mythical animals. I can now rest at ease knowing that I have seen some of the finest artwork that Vienna has to offer as well as some of its crappiest. I really do like the renaissance but not so the modernist work of Egon – the freak – Schiele. I liked the colours of Gustav Klimt but found the subject matter disturbing. In one palace we came across a painting of an Egyptian market place which showed a scene of how such a place might have looked 150 years ago. This was very interesting to me and it really felt like I was looking back in time. Likewise the painting of Napoleon Bonaparte on his steed was very majestic.
We moved on to more churches and palaces in the locale of Klosterneuburg and while they were indeed lovely to behold they did make me wonder at the excesses of royalty back in the day. I think that many people probably starved while these few lived it up and we call that culture.
A different type of culture and one which I liked much more were the local wine bars. These looked like houses from the outside but once through their large double doors you could sit around their courtyard and eat and drink to your fill. The wine is all made at their local vineyard and is very cheap (approx. $AU2 a glass) and contains no preservatives. Although I still managed to drink enough to give me a headache the next day. You could see a lot of locals visiting these places each evening through the week and we have both come to the opinion that Europe loves its grog!
Lasting impressions of Vienna are as follows:
Quite a stern bunch of people that project an outward cold face to strangers but can be good fun when you get a glass of wine in their hands. Anyone in the service industry will smile and try to help you except if they work for the rail or bus service in which case their understanding of English or sign language are non existent. Everything is expensive in Vienna except for the wine at the local wine-haus. But absolutely nothing is for free including the public toilets. We found our 7 days in Vienna to be a very expensive exercise and consider ourselves lucky we didn’t have to pay accommodation. My recommendation to future travellers would be to book 2-3 nights at a hotel in the city itself. Buy a 2-3 Vienna transit pass and get around to all the sites you feel you need to see. Be aware that the majority of these museums will want money for entry and most will not allow photographs. Occasionally you find a church that lets you in for free, but mostly these places want your money – and lots of it.
Onward we go now towards Buda-Pest. The railjet train is more crowded than we thought it would be but not so bad
really. At least you can’t see the railway track through the bottom of the toilet unlike the Bratislava train which had a sign saying no toilet while waiting at the station! I really did feel like leaving the Slovakian taxi drivers a special present – on their railway track – but we had already left the station by the time I discovered how wonderfully dreadful their toilet system was.
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