Reflections on Vienna

Google Maps with Airbnb marked with heart (upper right) “want to go” in green and saved with yellow stars.

Kitty and I are less than two weeks away from 4 weeks of October travel in Austria and Hungary. We’ve been planning for months, eager to return to a German-speaking country. Originally we seized on Berlin, a favorite city, but found ourselves wanting some of that historical architecture we had come to love in Barcelona. We settled on Vienna, Budapest, Graz and Baden bei Wien. Of those locations, only Budapest marks new ground for us, but lots has changed since we visited Austria.

We last visited Vienna 28 years ago in 1991. I remember we had perfect spring weather with green skies at sunset. In 1989 we spent several days there following travels in Yugoslavia. We welcomed all that bourgeois comfort after bouncing around in a bus through Croatia. We spent a few days in Vienna and then a couple of nights in Baden, a recommended spa town adjacent to the Vienna Woods. In Vienna we stayed in a cheap pension, Pension Ani Falstaff, and our place in Baden had a trail right outside the door leading directly to the woods. I think it was that trip where we heard a cuckoo for the first time. We wondered whether or not it was a real bird. Perhaps there was some hidden woodland cottage nearby with their clock sounding?

In 1985 we stayed a few days in Vienna at the Pension Kraml. We had a large room with a TV (one of the first we’d enjoyed in Europe as budget travelers. We watched “Hill Street Blues” in German). We visited the Belvedere where we savored Klimt and secessionist style. We walked all over the inner ring, discovered the outlying Heurigen (wineries), cheap chicken at Esterhazy Keller, the Vienna Woods, and strolled along the river of what had become by then a favorite city.

Our first visit to Vienna was 1982, when we somehow managed to arrive in the afternoon, take in the Schönbrunn Palace, wander the city that night (lost, we mistake the Vienna city hall for Stephansdom), and then leave the next morning at 8:00 AM. We moved much faster in our twenties, but it was glaringly obvious even then that we hadn’t allowed enough time. I vowed to return. This time we will get reacquainted with Wien through a slower travel mode, returning to some favorite places and finding new ones along the way.