The Internet Personified: Ten things about Vienna

And what my mother and I did there

Nov 26, 2024

I took this photo by accident, I wanted the building and the huddled windswept teenagers got in my way but I think it’s a good representation of how every time you want to look at a beautiful building there would be a group of windswept teenagers in your way. So! *waves arm* Vienna!

The first thing you should know about Vienna, or at least about our trip to Vienna is that it was a last minute addition to my itinerary. I had at first considered doing Rome and Sicily, or Rome and Florence (but I’ve been to Florence) or Rome and Athens (but the tickets were oddly expensive to go back and forth, let alone to Berlin) or Rome and Lisbon (but the hills are slippery when it rains and we like to walk) so in the end, I asked K what he thought and he suggested Vienna. “After all,” he said, reasonably, “You’ve always wanted to go and I’m not really that interested, so wouldn’t it be nice to have company?” Had I always wanted to go to Vienna? The geography was perfect, on the way home on a map of Europe so we could (and did) take a day train to return to Berlin.
Last winter, in Delhi, I went to a delightful dinner party at the house of a couple, both diplomats, one from Germany and one from Austria, and they said they could choose which country they returned to and they both decided on Vienna. “It’s so beautiful,” one of them said. Then of course, I realised I had come across Vienna in pop culture, there’s the Billy Joel song, that starts: slow down you crazy child. You know the song. It’s literally called Vienna. It’s all over Before Sunrise (a movie I plan to rewatch before the day is out). You know The Blue Danube (da-da-da-da-da, plink-plonk, plink-plonk). There’s so much I’d been consuming over the years and they all went back to Vienna, and yet, for the life of me, I couldn’t tell you a single thing the city was famous for. Music? I thought to myself in a panic the night before I left Rome. Marzipan chocolates? Vienna loomed, beautiful and also a complete mystery.
Not like me. I might be beautiful but I will never be a mystery to you because I have a habit of writing down everything I’m thinking of (but in a charming way? that’s a roll of the dice, my friend) which you will learn if you subscribe for free.
I had no interest in Viennese food. Zero. None. You may find this surprising, why go to a country and not eat its most famous outputs, but I find the food from this part of Europe (Germany, Austria etc) extremely stodgy and boring. A schnitzel is fun to start but midway through (why are they so large?) you get exhausted. I like the hearty meat stews, the goulash, but I think the Hungarian goulash is superior to the German version. I’m not a huge fan of kaese spaetzle, which is little noodles covered with cheese sauce. I don’t like knoedel, which are dense dumplings, and honestly, the only time I eat any of these things are on special occasions, which is to say Christmas or similar, when I enjoy the change to my regular diet but it’s not a food genre I would seek out. (An exception is the meats, I do think this part of the world knows how to cook meat nicely with the roasting and the frying and the broiling, so I would just eat that all the time, but it gets samey if you’re doing it over a whole holiday.) Also we had just come from Rome with seven full days of pizza and pasta, I was dying for some rice. So I decided I would treat Vienna like I was in Berlin. Which is to say, not seek out a schnitzel but look for really good Thai food. Or Chinese. And so on. Reader, we feasted like queens. Here’s a short list, if you find yourself in Vienna with the same problem:
1. Sentepe Bistro and Cafe: You have to go to this father-daughter run tiny Turkish cafe if you’re by the Freud museum. They do your usual kebab-shebab but also a selection of hot dishes like beef, veg etc, so you select what you want and they bring it to you with rice. Delicious and cheaper than you’d expect.
2. Thai Imbiss: Do you know how rare it is to find pad krapao literally our favourite Thai dish and also the most popular street food amongst actual Thai people (in Bangkok anyway) in any authentic Thai place in Berlin? You have to hunt and even then it’s going to be fine dining. And to stumble upon it in a small Thai shack next to a second hand shop which you’re only popping in to because you’re there! And to find food you’ve never seen on an overseas menu! My only regret is that since the two of us shared a plate we couldn’t order more from the menu owing to our smallish appetites.
3. Chen’s: In the centre, right by the Albertina museum, really good mapu tofu and filled, absolutely crammed with Chinese people, so you know it’s the real deal.
4. Buffalo Wings: And, oh, okay, one night we picked up chicken wings and went back to the hotel and watched When Harry Met Sally but you must always leave room for an evening like that on your hectic sightseeing holidays as well.
In Vienna, there is an old tower built by an architect wanting to escape his wife and children. There are no staircases in the tower which is seven stories high, because he took a ladder and pulled it up after himself. Our tour guide said men are especially interested in this tower. I bet they are. I bet they think they are all worthy of towers, having done the hard part of impregnating their wives. In the Albertina museum, I learned that Picasso grew so frustrated with the fact that his 21 year old partner (Francoise Gilot, he was in his sixties when they met) had two babies with him that he shouted at her that she was trying to control him with “her” children. (When she left him, he told all the art dealers he knew—which were a fair number—not to buy her work.) (This fact was not in the museum nor any apologies for Picasso himself, who we were encouraged to think of as a genius.) (And he was! His art changed the world! We have a print of Seated Woman With Green Shawl on our bedroom wall! But he was an awful, awful person. A ladder carrying architect, pulling away from the world but expecting to be part of the world anyway.)
Here is the tower. He lived on the top two floors.
In Vienna, says the tour guide, leading us to the clock that changes characters every hour, underneath which tourists are gathered, faces turned upwards like sunflowers, the Austrian government owns most of the houses. And that’s why our rents are so cheap. And if you have a problem? Why, someone will come right away and fix it! And you see, here we have an app, it allows you to make complaints about the city, and the red ones are the ones not yet fulfilled, and the green ones are. Once, says the tour guide, someone complained about a missing cobblestone and they came and fixed it right away. To illustrate this app, the guide tells us a story: once a man with Alzheimers went for a drive. He wasn’t supposed to, but he did anyway. After a while, he forgot where he was, and in a panic, he called his wife. “But where are you?” she asked and he replied, “I don’t know!” So she called the police who said, “That’s fine, ask your husband to lean on his horn.” It was Sunday you see, and this man, this confused man, far away from his home, honked and instantly the app lit up with complaints and the police were able to find him and take him home. It’s a good story even if it may not be true. In Vienna, says the tour guide, we get our water from fresh mountain springs and that’s why it tastes so good. I have lived in all the major European capitals, he says, and I have found the public transport here to be the best I’ve ever seen.
By this time, I’m getting grumpy and sus of all this “how amazing Vienna is” conversation, because it is a tiny city and if a tiny city can’t solve its problems what hope do the rest of us have, and I like Berlin, I think monogamously and stubbornly so I say, “Where did you move to Vienna from?” and he looks cagey and says, “I’ve lived everywhere” and this after asking us all where we were from, so why the secrecy, Marco, and then I said, “And the public transport here is the best?” and he said, dignified, “In my opinion.” Still, I think a good tour guide can also criticise the city they live in and not sound so North Korean about it.
On the other hand, cheap rent you say?
We did three museums in Vienna, all of which were wonderful, but you know, some things are more wonderful than others. My mother and I are both in therapy (a very evolved family dynamic there, but it means conversations about feelings can sometimes go on for hours if not days) so we were most interested in the Sigmund Freud museum, and we went there first. It’s cute, his house and office and some of things, a very text-y museum so you spend more time reading than anything else. A nice gift shop downstairs. I found out that Freud’s sister-in-law (and maybe lover? who knows!) was called Minna, which delighted me and this sign saying “Minna’s bedroom” delighted me more.
Asked a random man at the museum to take my picture and he looked confused so I said, “It’s my name!” and then he smiled and nodded.
The second museum was the best one, the Kunsthistorisches, or Museum of Art History with all sorts of amazing stuff collected by one of the royals, I forget which one. At this museum, we got audio guides, which I generally don’t get but at this one was completely worth it, especially as we had inadvertently turned up on a Thursday, a day where the museum is open till 9 pm and because we had also inadvertently turned up while the museum cafe was being renovated, we got to leave and go to the Christmas market outside and then come back in. I discovered the sentimental but elaborate paintings of Breugel, an old Dutch master and even bought us a Where’s Waldo-esque print of one of his pictures called Children’s Games which I thought was cool.
A section of the picture
After our charming full-of-character bathroom-door-less Airbnb in Rome, I wanted some facilities like crisp white sheets and no one caring who you were and large breakfasts, and so I picked a business hotel for the second half of our trip. More specifically Hampton by Hilton which is a chain I’ve stayed in before (in Torquay for my Agatha Christie talk) and so I knew their standards (solid) and their breakfast (excellent, not just a bunch of croissants and cold cuts making a sad little pile.) Plus it was cheaper than an Airbnb which is rare, so there’s a recommendation for you if you’re not looking for like boutique or even room service. It’s decent, it does the job and after a long day sightseeing you have no complaints, which is basically all a hotel is for in the end, don’t you think? I had fun making myself waffles at the breakfast bar anyway. I really love hotels, you guys. Especially the business no one cares who you are ones. I love the anonymity, I love not making conversation. I love the bouncy mattresses and the random pictures of nothing at all on the wall. And the novelty of it all! How the shower gel will be different from yours! And the little sets of things: sewing kits and whatnot! I’ve stayed at a five star once or twice (literature festivals) and while I love them, loooove them, they are a bit intimidating, don’t you think? Like everyone can clock you and your unposhness. These mid-range ones are perfect.
Like a really cold really Christmassy version of Chandni Chowk during Diwali season.
In Rome, everyone was in a couple, but in Vienna, they were all sets of parents with their adult children. I thought that was nice. We fit right in. Take your parent/s to Vienna.
Besides the food I’ve mentioned we also ate two sausages at roadside stands. One was basically a currywurst, but not cut up and served in a bun with onions, called a bosna (nice) and the other was cut up but without curry ketchup and was stuffed with meat and cheese called a kaese krainer (also nice) so you see, we did eat some local food of the region as well.
I haven’t mentioned the third museum, have I? It was the Albertina. I was underwhelmed because their main exhibition was Monet to Picasso and I feel I’ve seen a lot of Monet to Picasso so it was old stuff. Nice though. And a Chagall section which I enjoyed. But the audio guide was quite bad—we only got it because we’d been so delighted by the one at the Kunsthistorisches museum.

And that’s our trip! Now I’m buckling down in cold and grey Berlin—yes, my mum’s still here, she leaves next week—and so we will also look around in this city. We already have grand plans of doing the same sort of holiday the next time she comes to Europe, just pick two places on the map and take off. I think it’s an excellent idea. Maybe you have suggestions about where we should go next?

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