The only place I’ve ever really feel at home.
They say that home is where the heart is, but for me, the heart is where home is.
You never really can go back home, because when you leave, you change… but home stays the same. You know home not as where your family and friends are, but how your heart feels when you get off the plane. For me that’s Austria, specifically Vienna.
I’m really not sure why I feel at home there.
The Viennese are largely miserable people. Unfriendly and often rude to the bone, elitist and breathtakingly snobbish, they often believe Vienna is Mount Olympus. I have an English friend, a pretty affable guy, that once told me that he has lived in Vienna for 15 years and didn’t have a single Viennese friend.
I have a few, but through Opera. Opera is small tight community.
In fact, 100 years ago Vienna was Mount Olympus. Intellectually it was the center of the universe. Travel from Prague south, stop at Budapest, go over the Alps and make your way to Bolzano. From there travel west to Milan, North into Switzerland, onward to Basel, and east to Munich and you’ve covered 75% of the cultural world.
As an example, the US has about 30 opera houses, an opera house defined as a theater with an orchestra pit. Officially Europe has between 300 and 400 although the count is unknown. Even smallish cities like Nuremberg and Graz have them.
But Vienna was the heart. (Don’t say that to Italians.)
To be sure Vienna is a tourist trap, but in fact, tourism has been so heavily corporatized and Disneyesque that Vienna’s tourist area has become a roach motel. All the tourists go to the same places, eat the same tourist schnitzel and spend their days filming themselves.
Vienna actually exists in its original form outside the roach motel.
My favorite part of Vienna though isn’t the city, it’s the Stadtwanderweg’s. City walkways, there are 14, and all available with a city rail pass, which by itself is a great way to see real Vienna.
Without getting into detail, #1 and #2 are my favorites. The walk through Vienna’s old wine country is like a step back in time. Ironically though I’ve hiked these hills dozens of times I don’t recall ever seeing a tourist.
The other thing I love in Vienna are day trips by train. There are two that stand out.
The first is a short trip to Baden bei Wein. Baden is a typical small Austrian tourist town, on the artsy side, with a casino, but the village is beautiful, it’s quiet and the park is a great place to hike.
The second is a train ride. Plan for 1 to 1 ½ hours each way on the Semmering line towards Graz. I found this one by accident having left part of my luggage in a train and having to fetch it. They could advertise this trip as a tour and people would flock to it. They won’t though. It’s outside the roach motel.
One thing that’s fascinating about Austria and Bavaria is their penchant for nudity.
(The model for this is Alejandra in my novel 39 Down, actually partially a true story) What outsiders see as nudity though is their obsession with privacy. The gym I go to when I’m there (name withheld) is 100% nude in the sauna, steam and sleep rooms, but it’s also $250 Euro a month.
One really odd thing though I that I find Viennese women to be overly friendly when they’re buck naked in the Sauna. Of course, there aren’t many swimsuit models in a sauna, but the 50 something gals with boobs hanging down to the waist are quite nice. Getting back to privacy though, it’s a fine line that exists between being miserable and simply minding your own f’n business and I can’t say I dislike it.
There’s something alluring about going to parks with no f-bomb rap, restaurants with nobody screaming at each other and not having to deal with people’s dogs accosting you on the sidewalk. There’s less discipline in the Marine Corps than in Vienna.
Of course, their penchant for nudity is dying off with immigration from Muslim countries, but it still hangs on in higher prices venues.
Probably the thing that brings me back though and makes Austria feel so much a home is that in many ways the entire country is a playground. In fact, it used to be called a playground for Germans. Highly seasonal, you never run out of things to do.
A short list would be
Hiking (Winter or summer)
Mountain climbing. (Tame to butt kicking)
Kayaking
Skiing
Drinking
Classical Music
Cultural Festivals (Too many to list) … and finally, drum roll please.
Opera.
To be sure, the Vienna opera house has so many bad seats, it’s no wonder they don’t tear it down and start over, but they get flawless performances. But if you’re not in the balcony, (where the tourists sit) and know the ropes, (by ordering your between acts drinks in advance) it’s a great place.
Few countries have a more difficult road to the orchestra pit, but you have to go through it to get to the Vienna philharmonic.
I don’t really think of philharmonics as good or bad, but Vienna’s is flawless. Being American, I’m more familiar with the culture of musicals, in which the US is so far ahead of the world, there’s no catching up. And obviously musicals are far more entertaining.
But both opera and classical music rely heavily on discipline starting in grammar school and going on for many years. Audiences can hear flaws from the parking lot. It’s not for the weak.
Usually, when people write travel articles, they talk about restaurants.
Since I lived in an apartment in Vienna I’m not a restaurant guy. Austrian food was what my mother made when I was a kid, and she was quite authentic.
I don’t find Vienna’s restaurants particularly special. Tourists love to order schnitzels, but schnitzels are poor man’s food made by pounding the crap out of roadkill and frying it. I much prefer the Texas specialty called chicken fried steak which is to die for!
But Vienna is known for deserts. One that most people hate, and I love is the Sacher Torte. If you get it at the Hotel Sacher, it’s less sweat and has a tangy taste which make foreigners cringe. If you get them outside the Sacher, they taste a bit like a Hostess cupcake.
That said, as you get away from the roach motel, the quality of deserts goes way up. A good place to find them is in the embassy district and the area where the OPEC headquarters is.
Outside of that, I think the best place to live is Vienna’s 19th district.
This is the area called Dobling and especially the village of Nussdorf. The start of Stadtwanderweg #1, it’s a quiet village the in wine country. It was recommended by an Austrian friend who said, “Don’t listen to anyone. Vienna’s 19th district is the best place in Austria to live.”
Let me end this by going over the parts of Vienna I hate.
The tourist district which I call the roach motel.
It’s hard to know where to start. There’s Schonbrunn castle, a hideous rectangular building painted piss yellow that looks like something the Soviet Union built to house the ministry of propaganda. The parks look like they were designed using a $29 copy of landscape architecture for dummies.
Then there’s the Spanish riding school. When I say that my daughter’s pony 4-H fair was more interesting, I’m not being sarcastic. I suppose if the only horse you’ve ever been around was on a ride in a theme park, you might find the 120 Euro ticket worthwhile.
The Cathedral café. Long lines, bad service, bad food, tourist pricing.
Summer church concerts? I call them Mozart’s greatest hits. Most of the instrumentalists can barely hold instruments much less play them. If you haven’t already heard Vivaldi’s Four Seasons three thousand time you might like them.
Restaurants? Let me share with you the secret of food in tourist areas. The rents are so high that real food is impossible to make a profit on and they know you’re not coming back. My advice? Right in the middle of the tourist area where you can pay $300 for a pair of Walmart quality sneakers, there’s a 5 Guys. Eat there.
There is a part of the tourist area that I do like and strangely there are not that many tourists. In the summer they have a festival called the Vienna film festival. It’s in a park in front of the Rathaus, (City Hall) and has a large screen and food vendors. At night they show free concerts of many sorts, and they serve Ottakringer beer in pint glasses. That park is also used for the Christmas fair.
It’s on the ring, so you can take the Strassen Bahn if you don’t like walking. From here you can walk to the University of Vienna old campus, which is worth a visit to have a coffee in the courtyard and look at the statues of great intellectuals that taught there.
It’s a close walk to the Landtmann which is nice, relaxed café for breakfast or lunch. (Known for deserts as well as eggs benedict. Favorite of billionaire Arabic wives) It’s also close to another restaurant that I like called Zum Leupold.
Other things you might enjoy…
Ottakringer brewery. They have events all summer.
A day boat trip to Bratislava. Very close and convenient it’s about an hour on the Danube.
Flannagan’s Irish Pub. My second home in Vienna. Great crowd.
Rudolfshof. This is a restaurant I love near Baden bei Wein. It’s in a really nice park, secluded and very Austrian. Very passable venison schnitzel if you believe you have to have an Austrian schnitzel. (Spätzle no French fries.)
And finally, before you might get worked up about being on the Danube, Vienna wasn’t built on the river. In fact, the boat tours start in the offshoot of the river that’s nearer to the city. To see the Danube, a better place is Budapest, but that story is for another day.
One last note on Opera.
I know what you might be thinking. “I hate Opera. All they do is scream.”
You’re right. It’s known as controlled screaming. But I’m a Catholic and fully aware that my Catholicism is because it was hammered into my head as a child. The people I know that love opera are surprisingly not snobs. (I’ve never been to the NY Met) Most of them had music pounded into their heads as children.
This may sound odd, but to like opera, you have to want to. I did it by seeing 10 operas in two months in Prague and Vienna. It’s not the same on YouTube. To be present and see the interaction between the conductor, orchestra and performers is what whacks you in the head. The first time I saw The Magic Flute; I sat there with my jaw hanging. (There’s a plot twist at the end that’s not at all expected)
I remember saying to myself “What did I just watch?” I was then lucky enough to meet a lovely opera singer named Eleanor Lyons, an Australian on the train from Budapest to Vienna. After showing me several dozen pictures of her husband and kids which she missed dearly, (She lived in Vienna and was in Berlin on a gig) she went through my iPhone wallet and explained the nuances of what I saw and was about to see. I was blown away. (For example, ‘Octavian was not gay, they used a woman because the part called for a soprano.’
I’ll leave you with that. I feel a certain responsibly to try and explain what people are missing by not going to opera’s, not to mention by being force marched into the Vienna roach motel by tourist web sites.
Next time, we can talk about Budapest.