What I Did On My Holidays – Vienna

One of the very few holidays that doesn’t come with the epithet ‘so I went with my boyfriend…’ the Vienna expedition was a cunning plan formulated with me and my parents to take the train all the way from London to Vienna.  Which, as a surprise to us all, we did!  I guess my family has a sort of history of taking trains when going across Europe – with the opening of Eurostar and, even better, the plummeting of its prices, trains trips between London, Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Berlin, Rome, Montpellier,  Tolouse and, of course, Vienna, all became viable and exciting possibilities.  The TGV is cool, Thalys is comfortable, SNCF has its moments of wonder, Tren Italia is fun so long as you avoid the commuter trains, and Die Bahn in Germany is every part the pristine, compact symbol of German efficiency you, as a blinkered tourist, would hope it to be.  We took the Eurostar at a not-too-godforsaken hour from St.Pancras to Brussels, changed for the train to Cologne, ate dinner as the sun went down in front of Cologne Cathedral (ironically the only photo I have of the whole trip owing to circumstances too complicated to explain) and finally caught the NightLine to Vienna as the mist rose on the Rhine valley.  Oh boy did those mad German counts like their spiky castles on top of forested hill valleys… but that’s a story for another time…

Vienna is, by the by, all whipped cream.  For a start, 90% of the food comes with whipped cream either dolloped on the plate itself or cunningly integrated into the recipe and cake, particularly sachertorten, is the specialty.  Even leaving the food aside, the centre of town is a whole architectural dollop of whipped cream, from the paintings of chubby cherubs up every wall to the great Hapsburg Palaces dumped down left right and centre.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire is famous mostly for declining, but when not actively declining the aristocrats of the Empire were busy building every kind of baroque adornment that expensive taste could afford.  The exterior of the largely baroque buildings look almost austere, great big walls and big windows, but the interiors are packed so full of silver and the images of aristocratic warriors it’s a wonder there was room for people at all.  The cathedral at the heart of the city, St. Stephens, boasts one of the tallest spires in Europe, as well as regular gatherings of men and women dressed in mock-18th century dress trying to sell opera and Mozart concerts to the passers by, and if you look with a religious eye, there is Catholicism galore to be seen in gold crosses and saintly images scattered all over the place.  Culture, art, opera, and, of course, psychiatry, are all big things in Vienna, and it’s hard to turn a corner without encountering at least one of the above.  My family as a collective even decided that, since we were in Vienna, we should do the Viennese thing and go to the opera – my first ever opera trip – and paid a small fortune to sit in the highest, most distant seats I’ve ever experienced in my life, in an opera house of so much marble, real and otherwise, and such grandeur that really you didn’t need the show.  Opera remains not my thing.  The cake, however, was a major Viennese compensation…

Vienna gives the stranger the impression of a rather prissy city, in some senses.  My few attempts to speak German, the only language of which I have even a GCSE-grade grasp, were usually rebuffed by looks of, at best, curiosity, at worst, contempt, and I quickly fell back on letting my Dad doing the talking.  The streets are clean and orderly to the point of feeling slightly unnatural to my Londoner’s senses; the impression you couldn’t help but take away was that this was a society where the scorn you earned for littering was of a deeply penetrating, soulful kind, rather than the usual shrug of the city stranger.  The suburbs, where we were staying, and which are in truth little more than an extension of the inner city, hinted at some of the less imperial parts of Vienna’s past; endless matching courtyard-based blocks, samey shops and empty bars that could have been anywhere in Europe.  Vienna was, after all, the city of the Third Man, a Cold War spy shop almost up there with Berlin for its intrigue.

A canal runs through the heart of the city, built off from the Danube, and as a day-trip, and because we could, we took the boat up the Danube from Vienna to Bratislava.  The Danube is a Real River, at least as far as my imagination marks it.  It’s great, fat, rolling, churning, with a freezing wind on it even in high summer and all along its banks symptoms of its uncontrollable spillage; trees bent backwards, half-submerged shacks and lost wooden pillars for tying off your boat to a long-vanished bank.  This blog isn’t about Bratislava, but since I’m here, I’ll say two things; that is has a lovely small heart surrounded by a great deal of run-down sprawl, and that the Slovakian for ‘Winnie the Pooh’ is ‘Macho Puf’.  These were the two main impressions I took away from this experience.  That, and that on the Austrian-Slovakian border, you can farm ostriches.

One of the reasons why the Austro-Hungarian Empire had such a patchy time of it was that it was constantly being attacked from outside, and I can’t really walk away from this blog without mentioning my all-time favourite bit of history – the second siege of Vienna.  Oh yes, dear reader, the second one, because the first one was really a bit of a wash-out.  The second one, on the other hand, is celebrated in plaques and monuments across the city, since it was the nearest Vienna has ever come to being conquered in its history.  I’m not talking some wishy-washy nearest to being conquered – I’m talking a matter of hours between salvation and disaster.  I guess it’s fair to say that after three years of a history degree, my period, such as it is, are those nine weeks in autumn 1683 when Vienna was besieged by the Ottomans.  In other words, I know a lot about what happened in a two and a half mile radius in Central Europe for 9 weeks.  But make no mistake – it was an awesome, and arguably world changing 9 weeks.  Certainly, if Vienna had fallen, it’s likely the world as we know it would not be so today.

So, naturally, I was kinda excited by Vienna, and very much enjoyed my time there.  However, it was also rather alien to my usual cultural horizon, a fact I think best summed up by my trip with my parents to a modern art gallery.  We found ourselves, as is our way, seeking at the end of some half hour of wandering, the blissful relief of a bench, and after much searching, found what seemed to be the only bench in the gallery.  It was placed directly facing a huge black canvas, just black, plain black, whose title was ‘Untitled’.  We considered this for a while, trying to work out whether This Was Art, before finally noticing, to our left, another black canvas, slightly smaller than the first, but in every other way identical.  We craned in to see it, and this too was called ‘Untitled’.  Art or not art, I dunno, but it was, in its own quaint way, very Vienna….

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