Vienna, Austria
Castles and schnitzels and concerts, oh my!
As a treat on this transit day, we skipped the hotel breakfast and walked to that old castle courtyard place, where we had a classic French-style omelet — soft and perfumed with red peppercorns and chives — and another bowl of semolina porridge. We also picked up a veggie burrito for our train ride.
I was feeling pretty good for taking the tram — with all our luggage! — to the Prague Central Station, but once there, irritation grew. The signage around the station was atrocious.
As soon as we entered the building, the one information booth we could see was staffed by a lady who told me in “are you stupid” tones that she was from the local transportation company — so trams and buses were her expertise; she had no information to share about trains.
We wandered more into the belly of the station and found a schedule board that did not yet contain information about our train to Vienna, scheduled for 13:16 hours. When it eventually surfaced on the board, N. and I irritated each other by arguing about why our train did not seem to have a route number. He said that there are so many trains that the company did not know until the last minute what the train number would be; I said that was idiotic, since the company knew the trains would run, so each route/time should be given a route number (and sure, the platform number could be last minute). For now, the board only showed the company and the time of this Prague-to-Budapest train, with stops in Pardubice, Brno and Vienna.
Some of the sign boards also had the letters “S” and “J” with arrows pointing left and right. Given that these letters were pasted on two screens, we first thought that all the passengers for the trains listed on the “S” screens were to go left, while all the passengers for trains listed on the “J” screen were board to the right. But no, that would make too much sense.
We finally realized that trains were listed by departure time, and N. found an important detail online: information of platform numbers would be announced only 15 minutes before departure. This beautiful system led to people just having to wait in front of the screens to find, with bated breath, to which direction they should start running madly to catch their trains. Also, to make matters even more confusing, our platform was announced to be “4S” which also flashed “4 North” in English (I looked it up later; the Czech word for “north” is “sever”).
Once on the platform, there were no signs to indicate where the individual carriages would be — unlike in Korea, where on the floor of the platform, the specific train cars numbers are marked so that people will wait in their correct location. I approached a group of young men to ask if they knew where the carriage info would be. They were six dudes from Germany who also commented that, in Germany, one would be able to tell exactly where they needed to be. So they were as lost as we.
When the train eventually pulled into the station, the train cars had the number “1” and then a whole bunch of cars plastered with the number “2”. It wasn’t until the German guys trotted by and shouted, “Hey, there’s Number 6 — you have to go that way!” that we saw that smaller numbers were plastered in the glass doors.
Once inside, it came to light that N. had purchased tickets for seats in two different carriages — he was in Carriage 6 while I was in Carriage 5. As per his personality, N. said, “Oh, we can just sit together — there won’t be many people…” As per my personality, I refused.
Only after I had heaved my suitcase above my seat, he came tell me proudly that he had asked the person across from him to trade seats with me.
Which is how I found myself sitting across my separation-anxiety-suffering husband, writing this travel blog entry for two solid hours while the train sped towards Vienna.
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After a crazy chaotic breakfast at the hotel — the dining room had too many people and too few workers — I pointed out to N., visible in plain sight this morning, the reasons why I would never, ever, ever go on a cruise: IF each utensil on the buffet has smudges and bits of food AND one can hear individuals coughing, some into their hands, THEN you don’t need CSI skills to figure out why people become sick on cruises.
We ventured into downtown Vienna and found ourselves at a shop that sold ham sandwiches with different flavors; I ordered one with onions, while N. chose one with mushrooms. We had thought that the garnishes would be additions to the sandwich, but it turned out that they had been baked into the loaf of meat already: all the server did is cut a thick slab of the chosen meat, put it between slices of a kaiser roll (how appropriate!), and slather some mustard. It was efficiently tasty and hence, looking around, we saw mostly locals stopping to grab a quick bite for lunch. One novelty: they did have a horsemeat version.
We met our guide for the walking tour by the Albrechtsbrunnen (I get a kick out of these very long German words), and she took us around the main sites in the old town of Vienna, bringing up the most important characters of the long history of the Holy Roman and of the Austria-Hungarian Empires.
Stops in our walking tour included the Vienna Operahouse, the Austrian National Library, the Imperial Treasure (Schweizerhof Hofburg), the Heldenplatz (a few buildings around here had historical connections to the Anchluss and Austrian collaboration with Nazis during World War II of the The Sound of Music fame), the Sisi Museum, the Michaelerplatz, the plague column, and the Stephansdom.
We had our first wiener schnitzel in Vienna — the meat was thinner and lighter than expected; it was the size of our faces and was served with potato salad which, in my book, does not count as a vegetable. Thank heavens we ordered only one. We also ordered a salad (vegetables please!) and a Tafelspitz beef aspic, which lightened the whole meal.
In contrast to the Korean systems and similar to the Czech one, passengers in Vienna’s public transport were trusted, it seems, to have paid for their fare, because after we validated out tickets in the blue stamp machine by the subway station, there was no place to “check in” or “check out”, as it were. I’m guessing that the authorities here have done the cost-benefit analysis and figured out that it was more trouble than it was worth to add ways to make sure everyone paid their fares.
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It was our mistake, I guess, to try to exchange our dollars into euros by a couple of places near St. Stephen’s Church in the heart of touristy Vienna — thanks, but no thanks. And that’s the reason we could not go up the steps to the tower of the cathedral itself, since they only accepted euros and did not want to fuss with the admin costs of taking credit cards. Oh, well.
We had some cute open sandwiches for lunch (“Die Unaussprechlick Guten Brotchen”), wandered into a Viennese coffee roastery where an exceedingly talkative Austrian guy spoke about different coffees and, upon his recommendation, went to the roastery’s traditional coffeehouse across the street. We had a quintessential Viennese experience of surly waiters — as warned by our tour guide Lisa (“Viennese people are grumpy and like to complain… The most unfriendly Viennese are #2 waiters and #1 taxi drivers…”). The waiter ignored the request of an ice coffee for N. without ice cream or whipped cream (“Just a bit of milk please…”) and brought him a coffee with both.
We paid our dues, walked quickly around the Imperial Treasury — so much for god and country — and could not imagine another schnitzel; we had Italian food instead. The server spoke Italian to her coworkers and, in what I thought was typically Italian, took a break after our meals were delivered to smoke a cigarette by the street corner.
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Today’s plan: a guided tour of Schonbrunn Palace.
Considering it was a somewhat large place — the one fact about its size that was repeated constantly was, “it’s one third the size of Versailles…” — our tour of the main historical floor took less than 2 hours. (Would an equivalent at Versailles then have taken 6 hours?)
Afterwards, we walked to the Gloriette, had a bad lunch — we didn’t expect much, but needed fuel — and then escaped to our hotel where we read and took naps and almost didn’t make it back out.
The carpe-diem part of our brains won and we headed out with the intention of walking about the waterfront of the Danube. Our walk to the river showed that this neighborhood was — mercy god! — free of tourists. It comprised of small shops (for some reason, so many salons and barber shops), small corner grocery stores, and many “schules” which I guessed to be schools. We even passed what in Korea would be considered a food alley where families and couples were enjoying food and live music on this Friday evening.
We passed by the Francis of Assisi Church, which looked beautiful in the evening blue sky, and got, according to the map app, to the “Photo Point Donauufer Wien” which turned out to be blah. We couldn’t understand it: did the Viennese not understand the value of waterfront views? There was nothing pretty here.
We hopped on the underground station that was conveniently in the middle of that skinny strip of land in the middle of the river — the Donauinsel underground stop — and headed back to our hotel.
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We capped our stay in Vienna with a Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concert at St. Charles Church. What could be more Viennese than that? Auf Wiedersehen, Wien!
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