A Weekend in Vienna

One of the greatest things about living in Germany is that one is in the geographical heart of Europe and it is relatively easy and cheap to get to most other European countries by train. The German train service is excellent and therefore I decided to avail myself of the weekly special offers a couple of months ago and take a train to Vienna. So, I booked myself into a 3-star hotel online and set off from Frankfurt in the afternoon, boarding the flagship ICE (Intercity Express) trains of the Deutsch-Bahn.

It was a fairly cold winter’s day as the train left the station and wound its way rapidly through the mountains of Germany and into Austria. Soon we were rushing through snow-covered valleys and it was quite spectacular. I occupied my time reading James Joyce’s Ulysses and looking out of the window at the scenery. Because the borders are open and the two countries share a common language I was not even aware that we had crossed into Austria until policemen boarded the train and checked our passports or travel documents; being the only brown-person on board, my passport was thoroughly scrutinised but the British crown on it meant I was given it back after a short while with a gruff, “Danke”. Nothing of interest happened worthy of report apart from mentioning the beautiful young couple sitting a few seats away who were the epitome of Northern European beauty: tall and fair and blonde with chiselled features and toned bodies. It did not require much imagination to see them as characters in the Norse sagas or as one of the heroic races of Men from one of Tolkien’s books.

When we finally arrived, about 7 hours later, in Vienna’s Hauptbahnof (main station) the first thing I did was to buy a Vienna Card as I had read online beforehand that it was the cheapest way for tourists to travel in Vienna and also got one into the main museums at discount prices. I cannot recall exactly but it cost about 20 euros and enabled travel on all modes of transport for 3 days. I then hired a cab and went to my hotel which was a couple of miles from the city. It was night-time and as the cab glided through the wide-streets of Vienna, I tried to make small talk with the Turkish taxi-driver using a mixture of broken German and English. I could already see that the city was very grand in scale.

The hotel, like most things in this part of the world, was of good quality and clean and functional without being luxurious. I was quite tired from the journey and so decided to go and get a bite to eat and go to sleep, hoping to arise early the next morning to begin sightseeing. The streets were eerily quiet, and very clean, in this part of town and I just went into the nearest pizza shop I saw and bought a pizza which I took back to my hotel room and ate a part of before showering and going to bed; still I had spotted two underground stations a mere five minutes walk from my hotel so I knew I could use the U-bahn system (underground trains) to get around.

The next morning I took breakfast in the hotel—a typical German affair of rye breads, jams, marmalades, boiled eggs, tea, coffee, cereals (it was a generous spread) and then took the nearest tube to the city centre. I had made a list of must-see sights beforehand and how to get there. In addition to the usual tourist hotspots I also hoped to do my own “Before Sunrise” tour of Vienna too. For those of you who don’t know, Before Sunrise is a romantic film (a masterpiece), shot in the mid 1990s in Vienna starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke; since it was one of my all-time favourite movies I wished to pay homage to it buy visiting the places visited by the two main protagonists in the film.

As I entered the underground station I noticed a Pakistani (or Indian) newspaper vendor. I felt sorry for the fellow desi (I don’t know why) and stopped to buy an English-language newspaper (The Times or Telegraph I believe). I then took a train to the city centre and visited the imposing gothic splendour of St Stephen’s cathedral which its sharp angles and dark materials. I entered and was mesmerised by the glass-stained windows and the tapestries on the sealing. The place was full of tourists and I paid my respects. Places of worship have a calmness about them not found elsewhere although here the atmosphere was slightly stifling in contrast to the lightness of the Badshahi Mosque.

The grandeur of Vienna really hit me when I went outside into St Stephen’s Platz and turned around in a full circle, gaping in wonder at the architecture and the charms of the streets and the buildings. No wonder the whole of the city centre is a UNO World Heritage Site. I do not have a digital camera and the battery on my mobile phone camera decided to die at that very instance as I tried to take snaps of the Cathedral from the outside! So, I was forced to look for a shop selling those cheap Kodak Instant cameras. Luckily I found one less than a stone’s throw away.

The next item on my list was the famous Imperial Palace (Hofburg), centre of power of the Habsburg Empire for centuries. It was only a ten-minute walk or so from where I was now through the heart of the old city and when the palace first came into view, it was enough to take one’s breath away. The lovely detail of people dressed up in old Imperial costumes ferrying tourists around the vast palace grounds on horse-drawn chariots added to the fairy-tale charm. However I’d been on tongas before and the exorbitant price being asked was enough to convince me to walk around the Palace grounds. The light smattering of snow on the floor covered the grounds in a carpet of radiant brightness which added to the allure along and somehow complimented the chilly wind which blew. After walking through the many courtyards and quadrangles, the history of the place giving wild vein to my imagination, and soaking in the atmosphere (I am a sucker for imperial pomp and glory—harbingers, in my opinion, of a nobler, bygone, age!) I paid to enter the vast, round, high-ceilinged rooms of the Austrian National Library which, like many other museums, were situated in various wings of the Palace Complex. The library was ancient and smelled of books and parchments: manna from heaven for a bibliophile such as myself. The ceilings were painted with giant frescoes depicting Biblical scenes. Of particular interest to me were a pair of large globes in the middle of the library. These were maps of the world and the stars given to the Habsburgs by the Ottomans and the details were extraordinary.
I was joined in this ancient bibliothek by a trio of Russian ladies, all splendidly over-dressed in furs as is the custom it seems with these Slavic beauties!

I was quite tired by all the walking and, on being disappointed to find that famous Spanish Riding School was currently closed until the late afternoon, decided to have tea in the regal surroundings of the Palace Café where, surrounded by works of art on the walls in the expensive furnishings I had a delightful slice of Viennese chocolate cake called Sachertort and a cup of coffee. Feeling revitalised I then paid to enter the Imperial Apartments and went on a detailed tour of the living quarters of the Habsburgs which was fascinating as well as the Furniture Museum and the Sisi Museum—a museum dedicated to the Empress Elisabeth. All this was quite exhausting. Whilst there I could not help comparing mentally the difference between the opulence of these rulers and the Spartan, ascetic lifestyles of the Righteous Caliphs and of the Messenger himself although their empires were much larger than that of the Habsburgs! It was only a fleeting thought…However all this imperial splendour was quite overwhelming and left me tired. I was impressed to discover that parts of this Complex are still in use as various government buildings and some of the apartments are available to rent to anyone who can afford them. (Which gives me an idea: imagine taking a girl back to your place only for her to be confronted with the magnificence of the Hofburg. “Baby, this is where I live…” You’d be guaranteed to score!)

I took a walk around the lovely gardens and parks at the back of the Imperial Palace and was mesmerised by the beauty of the City. On one side of the park we have the Palace Complex, then the beautifully maintained and tree-lined park itself and on the other side the magnificent buildings of the Parliament and various museums. I was falling in love with the beauty of Wien rapidly!

I then left the Palace and walked back to the underground station near the Cathedral, getting a sandwich on the way. My next stop was to be the Summer Palace also called the Schoenbrunn Palace. This was also beautiful but not as grand or imposing as the Hofburg. I again paid for a full-guided tour of the inside (visiting 22 perfectly maintained rooms: there is a lesson here for the Pakistan Tourist Board who have criminally neglected the royal palaces of the Mughals, letting them decay and rot!) and perhaps the highlight was visiting the Banquet Hall where, the audio guide informed me, Khrushchev and Kennedy had their secret meeting. I had only recently seen the movie Marie Antoinette and so to be able to roam the actual rooms where she grew up and seeing her portraits on the walls really brought history to live and gave the movie added kick.

I also spend a long time walking in the beautiful acres of the summer palace’s splendid gardens but although it was a pretty sight in winter, being covered in a blanket of snow, I couldn’t help but be slightly disappointed that I could not see them in the full bloom of spring.

The sun had set by now and so I made my way back to the underground and went to the Aquarium in another part of the city. This was quite disappointing though and I left quickly, having wasted my money, I felt. By now it was snowing heavily and I was getting covered in the stuff, and feeling cold. (I don’t like snow!) So, I popped into a lovely little Japanese restaurant (I cannot recall the name right now—sorry!) where I had a lovely dinner and the owner let me have dessert on the house! Not bad service! As I walked the streets, just wandering, looking at the city streets and breathing in the fresh, clean, crisp air and the atmosphere of this lovely city, I couldn’t help noticing similarities and differences to both the UK, my homeland, and Germany. The biggest difference I noticed was the lack of different ethnicities on the streets. It was relatively homogenous.

I then decided to do the first item of my Before Sunrise tour: a church quite close to the University called the Votivkircher. Sadly by now it was shut so I could only see it from the outside. I was desperate, by now, for a pee and like Germany, Austria doesn’t have so many public lavatories, so I was forced to relieve myself in the dark in the park opposite the Votivkircher next to a statue of some poor fellow, melting the snow with the stream of splashing, hot, golden-yellow liquid, leaving xanthic stains on the white snow. Not very civilised, not very Islamic either and I was a bit ashamed but it was a very British way of saying: “I was ‘ere!” I also spotted another of the Before Sunrise spots nearby, a lovely little raised alleyway, full of cobblestones, called Moster Bastei. I then took the fabled circular S-bahn (tram) which does a circuit of the inner city and just caught my breath and a chance to warm my freezing body. The city at night, ablaze with the gentle glow of streetlamps, looks lovely: just like Oxford but on a far grander scale. I got off near the Parliament building and walked up its stone steps, joining a rowdy group of students who were celebrating something. A group of them decided to piss on the wall opposite the Parliament building and, laughing at the juvenility of this pan-European gesture, left them to it. Nearby I spotted what looked like an outdoor ice-rink and lots of music and went closer to see what appeared to be an outdoor concert of some kind with lots of teenagers ice-skating and parents watching.

I spent about another hour wandering through the little winding alleyways and streets of Old Vienna looking, unsuccessfully, for some more of the Before Sunrise sites but was really tired and decided to go back to my hotel but not before an old man tried to entice me into a sex club. I kindly declined.

Back at the hotel, I showered and went to bed. I toyed with the idea of going out to a nightclub but couldn’t be bothered to look for one and my body was protesting (I realised I was no longer 21!); I had a slight altercation with one of the Aussie hotel guests when I was using the computer there to type up my livejournal account of my day but it was nothing serious and I showered and went to bed, content, my mind buzzing with sights and sounds, and exhausted.

The next day was a Sunday and I had to catch the train back to Germany in the afternoon. I rose quite early and decided to finish my Before Sunrise tour if I could. I made my way back to the old city and, using a map from the hotel, and my own notes, was able to track down almost all of the places I wanted to. These were mostly not on most tourist brochures and thus a chance to discover the real Vienna. The highlights worth mentioning are the Maria Am Gestade church, which I found after going round in circles, and the beautiful Kleine Café which was, sadly, shut it being Sunday. I also had another slice of Viennese cake and coffee in a splendid little café whose name I have forgotten.

That was practically the last thing I did before taking the train, just in time, back to Frankfurt. I shared my journey back with a woman from Romania and her mischievous but adorable little girl of about 5 who had the whole compartment in tears of laughter with her antics. A lovely end to a great weekend. Vienna is a magnificent city and I will definitely visit it again, hopefully in the spring. There is still so much to see.