Vienna
This morning was a “free day”, meaning there were no commitments to do anything with the tour group until dinner in the evening. Given the way we’ve been feeling about the tour so far, that was welcome news. It’s not that we aren’t visiting beautiful places – we are, and for the most part we’re getting along with everyone in the group, save for one couple, and even then, it’s mainly the wife who has chosen to be an outright ***** towards Vanessa in particular. Everyone else in the group is aware that she’s a “contrarian” who likes to argue black when everyone else in the group has chosen white, but for some reason she seems to have picked Vanessa as the target for most of her vitriol. For the most part we just ignore her, and avoid having anything to do with her, but it’s been difficult at times to just ignore the sniping, which we’ve been trying to do for the sake of keeping the peace in our small group of nine.
In all honesty, the happy couple aren’t the major issue – it’s more the tour itself. Some of it is self inflicted I guess, albeit unintentionally. We did book a Christmas markets tour after all, without really appreciating just how crowded things could be, and we were aware that this tour visited some villages we knew to be on the small side, at least in mine and Vanessa’s case as we’d been to the majority of them before. We also understood that there would be some poky hotels with less than ideal room sizes, and beds that weren’t necessarily manufactured in this century. It’s just that we didn’t expect the hotels in the bigger cities to be the same – so far the smallest and by far the worst room has been the one we had when we first arrived in Vienna. As I’ve already said, Vanessa and I have shelled out for an upgrade at our own expense, but I don’t think there is a person on the trip who expected a room in a fairly modern hotel in Vienna to be smaller than one you’d expect to find on a cruise ship, especially one that’s a decent 15-20 minutes walk from the centre of town. At least with a cruise ship you get to unpack and stow your suitcases away for the trip – unlike this trip where we’ve spent far too much time rearranging cases and furniture just so that we can get into bed.
Thankfully, Vienna has a fantastic U-Bahn system, and with a station just a couple of minute’s walk from the hotel, we were able to skip breakfast (which has been adequate at best) and head a couple of stops down the track to alight at Rathaus station. The German word Rathaus, directly translated into English, means Council House, and generally refers to the town hall. Actually, I’m not sure you even need to translate it, I’m pretty sure most people would struggle to find a better term than Rat-House to describe city hall. The one here in Vienna is pretty damn impressive, and it’s also home to the largest of Vienna’s 20 or so official markets.
So after exiting the station, we stepped out to get a glimpse of the Rathaus just peeking through a thick fog. As the markets weren’t due to open for at least another hour though, we decided first off to walk another street back along the Ringstraße to where the Austrian Parliament building was finally free from the external wrapper of scaffolding that had enveloped it the last time we were in town.
Walking back to the pedestrian crossing that heads from the Rathausplatz (Town Hall Plaza) across to the Burg Theatre, we went in search of something that wasn’t dime-store cereal and leathery eggs for breakfast. Just nearby was Café Landtmann, but in this modern era of TikTok tourism, it’s impossible to get in there without either a prior booking, or a very long queue time, even at 9:00 am on a weekday.
Instead, we glanced briefly at all the Gen-Zs doing their best duck-face poses as they tried to recreate the same image they’d seen posted by a thousand of their peers, and instead went to find an equally delicious, but far less Instagrammable bakery just around the corner.
After breakfast and a brief wander through a very small Christmas market, we emerged back out onto the Rathausplatz and spent the next hour wandering slowly around the stalls. This market was definitely the most family-oriented market we’d been to, with lots of stalls selling candies, chocolates, fairy floss and Langos (a deep-fried flat bread eaten plain, or with numerous sweet or savoury toppings, like a pizza). There was plenty of Glühwein for sale as well, but Vanessa and I opted again for a couple of mugs of steaming hot Apfelwein instead. All around the markets, children could be seen running and playing chase, or having a wonderful time speeding along on skates at the ice rink in the park next door. We sipped our Apfelweins and stopped to browse here and there, taking particular interest in a stall selling all things Alpaca related. We ended up buying a tote bag with the slogan “Mir egal, Ich bin ein Alpaka” (I don’t care, I’m an Alpaca).
After finishing up at the Rathausplatz markets, we headed past the parliament building again, and a little way further along the Ringstraße to the Museum Quarter, where another market was in full swing. This one was a lot more adult-oriented, not in an X-rated way, just that most of the stalls sold jewellery or hand-made ornaments rather than toys. Of course there were still plenty of food stalls and Glühwein stalls, and the 5 Viking Cruises and 4 Ama Waterways buses gave a fair indication of the main clientele here. If you think it’s bad getting between a group of screaming kids and the fairy floss stall, just try getting between a bus load of American river cruisers and their first Glühwein fix of the day.
We soon departed these markets for the quieter surroundings of the Winter Palace gardens, where we cut across towards the main part of the old town, passing the inviting looking butterfly house in the process. We stopped briefly to check out the menu of a café within the former Imperial glasshouses, but it screamed “Tourist Trap”, so we kept moving.
Passing the Vienna State Opera building, we crossed the road to look at another tourist trap, the Mozart Café, and it’s even cheesier neighbour, Crossfield’s Australian Hotel, which is there I guess to console all of those American tourists who’ve turned up in Austria expecting to see kangaroos (sadly by the sounds of it, there are a lot of them every year). Because of course, nothing screams authentic Aussie more than a picture of a kangaroo over the Southern Cross, accompanied by an advertisement for a beer that no self-respecting Drongo from Downunder would be caught dead drinking.
Instead we headed down Operngaße, past the Hotel Sacher and its long line of duck-face TikTok influencers, and into the main shopping area near Stephansplatz. We weren’t really sure what we wanted for lunch, but the site of a funky looking burger joint took our fancy, and we had a couple of surprisingly good burgers that were sure to be enough to tide us over until evening.
We then headed back to the hotel for a little R&R before joining the group downstairs for a longer than expected walk all the way back into town (and past several perfectly respectable looking U-Bahn stations), to visit the oldest restaurant in Vienna, Griechenbeisl. Here we were regimentally divided between tables (which is my single biggest grip about this whole trip – being constantly told where, when and what we can eat, and where we have to sit while doing it). Just in case someone had missed the drill from the past 9 days, we were reminded that we were each entitled to one free drink only with our dinner. Honestly, sometimes it feels less like a holiday, and more like a prison camp, except the standard of food is probably higher in prison. In tonight’s case though, the food wasn’t too bad. At least, I didn’t hear any of the other inmates complain…