Whistlestop Vienna

Thursday pm and Friday, Vienna

My lovely Innsbruck Guide, Elizabeth, told me that Austrian bureaucracy comes from the Germans and their enjoyment of life comes from the Italians.

The Fraulein on reception duty at Vienna’s 360 pound a night Ring Hotel has certainly studied the former characteristic and passed with first class honours. While I understand that hotels do not want people to leave without paying their bills, I am always astounded that they get away with their insistence to not only have your name, address and passport details, but want to charge your credit card up front too. The Ring wants a daily deposit of 100 Euros. I am especially annoyed because, in my case, I am here supposedly to give the establishment a good write up and feel the welcome is less than I would have expected. The PR lady apologises, then, to add insult to injury, makes some feeble excuse about a journalist who’d once emptied the mini bar and left without paying as being the reason the front desk were following ‘policy’.

Anyway, I am forbidden to use the mini bar, the telephone is barred and, if I want anything in the hotel, I will have to pay for it there and then.

As a small bottle of Heineken is, I later learn, almost a fiver, more fool anyone who uses the said mini bar or, for that matter, a hotel telephone. I use Skype on my laptop to call home for 17 Eurocents a minute, so, boo sucks to the front desk.

I must say the room is exceptionally well appointed, with all sorts of hi-tech things to confuse and entertain. I find it odd that the handset in the shower has not got a wall attachment on which to hang it and while I fiddle about with a myriad of gleaming knobs and buttons; I receive a soaking, fully clothed, by a large volume of water from a separate and very large overhead shower rose.

Fraulein’s revenge!

I decide that twelve quid for a club sandwich in my room is a bit steep, so I walk all of fifty metres to the local Spar supermarket and stock up with a pre-prepared egg salad, a freshly sliced fruit platter and a couple of beers; I have change out of a fiver. Advantage me. There’s even a knife, fork, plate and napkin provided in my room.

Game, set and match Souter.

I take a walk through the main drag and am hugely surprised by the graffiti, the number of vagrants, beggars and general riff raff. For the first time since I left home, I feel unsettled, ill at ease and clasp my bag even more closely to me. To contrast this impression, there are also vast numbers of veiled ladies completely covered in black, with only their eyes showing, darting in and out of the hugely expensive designer shops. It appears that Vienna is very much the playground of moneyed Middle Eastern Arabs. The Ring Hotel is owned by a Saudi Prince, so I am informed.

Down by the Danube canal, it’s a total contrast, with hordes of drop outs, drug dealers, alcoholics and other assorted society cast offs. Bizarrely, I feel much less at risk than in the centre of town, but I wouldn’t venture here in the dark.

I thoroughly enjoy the private dining facilities in my room and have a wonderful night’s sleep on a luxuriously appointed sheikh size bed.

My guide is art historian Alexa Brauner. But my brief to all the tourist offices on my itinerary has been clear. No museums, no art galleries. I want to see the unusual, the hidden spots, and the quirky.

Alexa sets off at breakneck speed, cramming what I was led to believe would be a full day itinerary into just two and a half hours. Well, it’s Friday and she has a two-hour drive to her family’s country home, west of the capital.

I am staggered by just how big Vienna is. There are over 1.6 million inhabitants and that’s projected to return to the previous two million by 2035. It appears that all the residents of the former Austro Hungarian Empire want to re-establish old connections with the place. Austria’s second largest city, Graz, is tiny by comparison, with around 280,000 people.

We take the underground to see the giant Ferris wheel in the vast Prater Park. This is the famous Riesenrad, dating from 1897, that has featured in films such as the Third Man and Living Daylights. There’s even a museum in Vienna dedicated to the Orson Welles’ classic, but, sadly for me, it’s only open on Saturdays. Alexa tells me there is also a museum dedicated to funerals and undertakers. Apparently, the Viennese are very keen on having a decent send off, so start saving early. Her own funeral plan was started by her mother.

The very efficient subway has five lines, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Line 5 was planned but never built.

Alexa takes me on a tour of lesser known Vienna at a canter, her eye constantly on the clock. The Naschmarkt is well worth a visit, with some really unusual stalls, including one that specialises in a huge range of vinegars. At night, the market’s restaurants are especially busy.

Nearby, a whole range of incredibly quirky shops and restaurants. My favourite is Gabarage, where former drug addicts, as part of a rehabilitation project to normal employment, make a wide range of useful objects from discarded materials. I am thrilled when Alexa propels me, by now almost at a gallop, towards her favourite coffee shop, the Café Sperl. I am gasping for a cuppa and am pleased to have the chance to experience somewhere rather less touristy than the over expensive tourist haunt of the Café Central. But, no, there are more shops to see, hills to climb, statistics to trot out. I wish I’d planned to stay the average 3 nights of the city’s 10 million overnight visitors. After this madcap circuit, I now need at least 2 nights to recover.

In the museum quarter, we stop at last for a much needed coffee. Alexa heads off for her long weekend and I limp a few more yards for lunch, seeing more city centre graffiti than I have seen in a long time.

The Glacis Beisl offers a very decent two-course lunch for just over six pounds, and I am lucky to get an outside table at this very popular local haunt, just at the edge of the museum quarter.

I spend the afternoon pottering the back streets, soaking up the atmosphere. While I know that every big city has its odd-ball characters, I am convinced that Vienna has more than most. There are substantial numbers of seriously weird looking people around, with dreadlocked hair, tattoos and strange body piercings. That’s even before I get to the Kalrlsplatz subway station where, Alexa has told me, most of the drug dealers hang out.

The hotel has a superb steam room and spa area, so I repair there to recharge my batteries before committing these thoughts to paper.

On completion, I look at the room service menu, fall off my wallet, and so return to Spar.

I am beginning to feel rather like an American tourist. Tomorrow will be Saturday and so it’s Prague.