Back on the Danube! It's a direct flight from Moldova to Vienna. For the first time in nearly a month, my sleeping quarters (another studio flat) are not shared with bedbugs. There's only been one cockroach so far on this trip, an elderly one ambling placidly around my Chisinau apartment when I arrived. I squished it humanely and no others appeared.
On the train from Vienna airport, our arrival time into the Hauptbahnhof was signalled in English as 'three past three'. It doesn't sound quite right, does it? Not for the first time, I very belatedly became aware of a rule that I've been using in spoken and written English for nearly half a century without ever thinking about it. The rule is this: you can only give the time as 'X past Y' or 'X to Y' when X is 5, 10, 20 or 25. Otherwise, we say 'three minutes past three' or 'three oh three'.
Here there is a Sigmund Freud museum, but I never paid much attention to the ideas or writings of Vienna's second-most famous 20th century resident. As to Vienna's most famous 20th century resident, well, the less said about him the better. There is of course a grubby furtive industry of 'dark tourism' where you can go on walking tours and learn all kinds of interesting facts about how a failed landscape painter overcame injury and adversity to succeed in causing 55 million deaths. The Judenplatz square and Judengasse street have been there for many centuries, and the fraktur signs remain in place with the consent of all concerned - there is a Holocaust memorial in the Judenplatz - but still it's hard not to feel your skin crawl when you see the combination of that font and that word, as in the picture below.
And yet, for anyone who prioritises music among the arts, Vienna still represents pretty much the apogee of human civilisation. I've been paying homage to local thinkers such as Hayek and Karl Popper, but mostly it's all about the thrill of walking the streets that Mozart and Beethoven walked. Sadly, having come here at short notice, I've found that the big symphony orchestras and opera houses are sold out long in advance. You can always get tickets to the generic Mozart concerts, but in most cases the advert doesn't even mention what's on the programme. It's just Mozart's Greatest Hits for people who might recognise a melody or two but wouldn't know one piece from the other. At this point my nose goes up in the air an inch or two, and I shall say no more.
The bustling centre of Vienna is not to my taste. Everyone is a foreign tourist. I lost count of how many McDonalds branches there are. And if I'm being completely honest, the castles and palaces just don't inspire me all that much. They're big and stately and impressive and grandiose - all those things - but I couldn't really call them beautiful. It's hard to shake the impression that they were nothing but pointless vanity projects for deluded aristocrats living on borrowed time. All over the world right now, Russian oligarchs and Arab oil sheiks are building similar-sized things, and in time they too will go the way of the Hapsburgs. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
Looking at my pictures below, I can see that I've just taken the same shots as all the other tourists without capturing any real impression of the cultural and social life in this city. I guess I don't like intruding on the privacy of others by taking random pictures in crowded streets or cafés. But in spite of everything I've written above, Vienna is definitely the highlight of my trip so far. I could never share Midge Ure's indifference on this matter.
 |
| Belvedere Palace |
 |
| Hofburg |
 |
| Lowry-esque view of Schonbrunn Palace, seen from the rear on a cloudy day. |
 |
| Schonbrunn from the front, on a non-cloudy day |
 |
| St Stephen's Cathedral |
 |
| St Charles's Church |
 |
| The Gothic font is called fraktur and it pre-dates the Nazis by centuries. Even so...see my comments above. |
 |
| Writing this blog in my studio flat with a Vienna lager, while my washing dries on the airer. |
 |
| Edd vs Food #118 Wienerschnitzel on its home turf! Just like chicken kievs in Kyiv, and KFC in Kentucky. And Yorkshire puddings in Yorkshire. I've done it all. For the official authentic genuine Vienna experience, it's served with potato salad, not fries. The potato salad is more vinegary and moist than the chunky American version we're used to. |
