Day 2, Vienna

Be warned, there is a LOT of this - 4 sides in word. You may find it easier to treat like a swimming pool, dipping in and out as takes your fancy.

Saturday 19th Schoennbrun.

Here we are in the airport waiting to fly home. I got tired last night, writing about our first day (keep thinking of things I’ve missed, like the food shops in the underground) and finished about 11.00ish. We had a generally relaxed morning preparing to leave, and even packing wasn’t too bad. Vienna airport was hot, noisy and crowded on the ‘wrong side’ of passport control, but here by gate A50 it’s cool, calm and comfy. So on with the story.

I had arranged for a tour. I normally hate the idea, but this time it seemed good to help orient ourselves in an effectively un-known city to make the most of the time. We were collected a little late from the hotel, then transferred to a new coach at a deeply ugly bus station built in the 50s. The guide was a blond lass about our age called Jennifer (really her name?) with again excellent English. Something we noticed early on was how the Viennese have a soft accent. German people speaking English tend toward a harder tone, with sharply pronounced ‘Oww’ sounds. The Viennese is smoother and quite easy on the ears.

We drove through the city, out to the Prater (city fair-ground, rather like the Tivoli Gardens of Copenhagen) with it’s big wheel. This was my first real disappointment. As a 6 year old boy, the wheel had seemed enormous – it used tram cars as carriages! With experienced adult eyes, its 67 odd meters height seemed relatively unimpressive, and I wondered how I managed to remember all those roof-tops from my original trip. Still, it is the oldest wheel in existence.

The journey out to Schoennbrun was relatively un-attractive – lots of concrete buildings, housing that was clearly ‘low-cost ethnic’ and graffiti – the ‘un-seemly’ side of city life. While describing the various palace buildings as we had passed them, our guide also talked about life-style and income. Typical wages, it was suggested, were around 1200 euros/month take home, with about half that being spent on rent. More on that later.

Schoennbrun was pretty much what we’d expected. There was a smaller market there, compared to the version outside the Rathaus, but it looked great, as by this time it was snowing as hard as I’ve seen almost anywhere. To keep warm, Chris enjoyed a Kinderpunsch and I had a Jagertee: basically strong tea with even stronger rum added. The buildings here were as ornate and over-done as one might expect from the rulers of a very substantial eastern European empire. Some of it WAS beautiful, while some was just ‘knee-deep-in-decoration-because-we-can’.

Just an idle thought. Apparently a mark of the Habsberg family was a protruding lower jaw. My lower jaw has always stuck out – kids at school used to make fun of me because of it. I dreamed, as one does in early teenage fantasy, that I might have been part of such a family, long lost, and due to inherit some forgotten wealth. Fat chance. My father’s sister once had the family trees examined, hoping for exactly such a thing. It turns out that, rather than being royalty in name, some of our ancestors were hung for street-robbing. Apparently there are lots of Habsbergs around the world today, all independently wealthy and none of them recognised by Austria as having any ruling rights. And of course, that’s not to say that a Habsberg didn’t pass a few genes along, via the wrong side of the blanket.

Apres tour we had lunch in a Restaurant called Rosenbergs on Maysedergasse. This was a bit of a cop-out, and it was all self-service with most servitors speaking good English. The cuisine was reasonably authentic Austrian, and that made up for it. We played ‘dumb tourist’ and had snitzel, although I managed to get some dumplings and mushrooms with mine, rather than the universally acceptable potatoes. It was good too.

Since we’re on the olfactory side of things, one of the things I always do when visiting a new country is to sniff the air. Stockholm I mentioned was kind of sharp and flinty, whereas Vienna airport’s air was almost odourless – fresh and clean, but without any particular smell other than airports generally. However by this time I’d been collecting and processing a lot more data from my nose, and can say that Vienna smells like nowhere else, being rich and varied, and with a strong sense of having been lived in for a very long time. There’s a gentle spiciness to the air that comes from Apfel strudel and Goulash, rich coffee and frying food, gluhwein and frankfurters. And tobacco smoke. Smoking is relatively rare in the UK, and the cigarettes all smell similarly unpleasant. Austrian tobacco smoke would sometimes get too much, but was warmer and sweeter generally, with a cigar-hint. I don’t know that I’d recognise these smells again immediately, because they take time to filter through the senses, but both the food and the smells reminded me intensely of my childhood, even though we were in England, with my mother cooking Austrian-style. Even now, all that she touches has a hint of Austria.

On the coach we’d met an Australian family – Ian and Di (not another Sue!) with their daughter Heidi and granddaughter Juliette. They were friendly, and we talked a bit going round Schoennbrun. Then we bumped into them again in Rosenbergs. Turned out the next leg of their ‘round the world’ trip was in England, with them staying a week in the Cotswolds. It seemed a good idea to give them our address, and who knows – maybe we’ll see them sometime next week?

After lunch we explored a little more, wandering down to the Naschmarkt and the flea market that is held behind it. We’d been warned on the coach ride to go there “it’s not nice” and “what is stolen in the week in Vienna appears there on Saturday”. This is where we saw the other side of Vienna – the true poverty. The Naschmarkt was interesting, with all kinds of foodstuffs available, Austrian and Turkish (Austria has many Turks) plus Chinese restaurants and a large fish section. We even saw cooked fish being sold for consumption in the same way as kebabs are sold in England. I bought a couple of bottles of wine here, just for fun really – who knows if they’ll be drinkable? Prices were noticeably lower here to – the first time we’d seen anything like discounts.

In the Flea market we were amazed to see what appeared a cross between a jumble sale and a boot fair, with piles of clothes, shoes, phone chargers, computer parts and miscellaneous household debris strewn on the damp ground or bits of cardboard. More amazing was how people were avidly rummaging through, looking for useful, reusable items. This was an intense contrast to the way clothes were displayed in shops, often in splendid isolation with low stock and high prices (or commonly, no prices at all – if you need to ask, you can’t afford it). One of my mother’s memories was of the elegant clothes shops ,where on entering she would be greeted with the words “I kiss your hand gracious lady”. If one did not show an inclination to buy then you ceased to be a “gracious lady” fairly quickly. It is likely she was only shown this deference because of her non-local status, and that they would not have been sure of her financial status.

Diverting from the main topic here a little, but adding thoughts, we had both wondered about why some of the large and obvious differences existed between Vienna and London. In London every thing is fast food, regardless whether it’s sandwiches, pizza or burgers, and the whole place is full of cheap clothes, fancy trainers and far-eastern produced electronic toys. Vienna by contrast has a little of the fast food concept, but tied it firmly to local style products, prepared freshly and suiting local tastes. They’ve blended in some of the Turkish flavours, but kept them in the same style, rather than abandoning national dishes. And everything with a hint of luxury is more expensive. It seemed to us that Austria has rejected the ‘supermarket culture’ that France and England have fallen in love with, instead preferring the ‘traditional’ ‘handcrafted’ things, made by local people at a living wage. We saw 2 ‘supermarkets’ there, one being an Aldi and the other on the Herrengasse (can’t remember the name). They were maybe half to a quarter the size of Bicester’s (small) Tesco. This approach is very much a double edged sword, as it tends to keep prices high and local people relatively hard up.

I think I rather admire a society that has apparently rejected the “give me more for less” attitude and *appears* to value the work of the hands.

One long trudge back to our hotel, a snooze and short interlude later, we head off to the Rathaus market again. This (Saturday) evening it’s crowded with people drinking, talking, snogging (Chris was a little shocked to see two girls at it) and buying stuff off the stands. It’s much more familiar now, and we only notice a few ‘new’ things. We managed to find a stall selling Gluhmost (spiced lower-alcohol apple drink) and that was nice.

There were some ‘interesting’ things we saw named on the food stalls that we just didn’t recognise: Fladbrot, Ungarische Langos, Kartofelblumen. We ordered a Langos, and it turned out to be a deep-fried bread, smothered in salty garlic butter – very messy and antisocial, but quite delicious. I passed on the Kartofelblumen – potato pancakes, as I didn’t want to eat too much, and instead we had spicy, smokey Grillwurst, again in the compulsory French bread, washed down with a Kinderpunsch for Chris and a Gluhwein for me. This time we hung around until they closed the stalls at 9.00ish

As we were leaving we could hear a cacophony of horns deliberately playing discordant notes across the road outside a theatre. Our view was blocked by a tram car, but we could see a large crowd gathered, intently watching something happening there.

We made our way over, and were greeted by the sight of a mocked up crucifixion scene: ‘Jesus’ - a blindfolded, barefooted man - was stood with his arms strapped to a bar, supported by a man on each side. A tall rectangular wooden frame rose above his head, and supported from the crossbar was a cow’s carcass, split open and bloody. The event was directed by a guy running back and forth, shouting orders and moving people around. He started pouring artificial blood on the ‘crucified’ figure’s mouth so that it ran down his front. A bunch of guys then came out carrying 5 bamboo poles about 20 feet long, each with a sword mounted on the end. They placed a cushion with a blood bag inside on ‘Jesus’ chest and then pushed the swords into it so that blood spilt and ran out. Finally they got rid of those and came back out with flaming torches. While some crowded round, others (around 40) picked up the wooden framework and started to carry it round the building.

I should mention at this point that the temperature was well below freezing, and all these people were dressed in tee shirts and thin white cotton trousers. We were feeling the cold, dressed in winter clothes, and the wind had picked up quite a bit. The actors were clearly shivering, and ‘Jesus’ must have been in a bad way. Because of the weight of the framework they could only carry it around a ¼ of the way before stopping and resting. It must have taken nearly 15 mins to complete the circuit of the theatre and finally escape. The actor playing Jesus had remained blindfolded throughout, and appeared so cold that he had trouble moving from his position after being unstrapped. They were finally able to support him back into the building. His feet were still bare on the freezing cobblestones.

Chris was fairly disgusted by all of this, and glad to get away. When it was finally over we made our way back to the hotel, grateful for the first time that our room was so warm. Thus ended our second day.