A Delightful City - Vienna Highlights

A couple weeks ago I got back from my trip to Austria, the first international trip I’ve taken since the pandemic began. It was a really fun trip, and a peek into a part of Europe I had only a superficial level of knowledge of. My trip consisted of 3 days in the town of Melk, and 5 days in Vienna. Melk is a very cute, delightful medieval town along the Danube River a little over an hour west of Vienna. Vienna itself is very small walkable city for a tourist. There is a quality and very useful metro, but if you are staying in a hotel near the city center, you can get away with walking to most places. All in all I had a much needed life break and a great time in Vienna. Here are the highlights – the great, the surprising, and the meh.

The Great
Hiking 
When people have asked me what my favorite thing about my trip was, I always answer “the almost 7-hour hike I took in the Wachau Valley.” Before my travel plans changed from Greece to Austria, I’d been training to hike the Samaria Gorge in Crete. When it changed to Austria, I looked for other hiking opportunities and found the Wachau World Heritage Trail – a 180 km trail loop through the Wachau Valley. The loop is broken up into segments that take you from town to town, and I decided to take the one that went from the town of Durnstein, which is famous for having the ruins of the castle where Richard the Lionheart was held, to Weissenkirchen a town centered around the Wachau winemaking (Wachau is basically the Napa Valley of Austria).

That hike - ostensibly 6 hours but 6 hours 45 minutes for me (including lunch) was the most amazing thing I did in Austria. It was an adventure. Beautiful nature and hiking literally through vineyards at some points, and just the joy I get from hiking, both the physicality and listening to music and podcasts as I go. But also spending 1 ½ hours going up a very large, very steep hill while avoiding hornets’ nests at one point. And about half-way through getting rained on for well over an hour. I almost got lost at least 3 times by mis-interpreting the directions. But it was beautiful and fun and an enjoyable challenge. It was an amazing day and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.  

Kunthistorisches (Art History) Museum Vienna
Generally speaking, I’m not a huge one for Western art museums. I prefer ceramics over paintings as an artistic medium and am an historian well before I’m art critic. But Vienna’s art history museums was excellent, and one of the top places I visited while there. The second floor has all of the famous paintings that people flock to see. The best section was the 16th and 17th century Dutch and Flemish masters, but everyone has their own taste in paintings. As an added bonus there were comfy couches in most of the large gallery rooms so you could sit and stare at the paintings if you wanted.

The museum had a number of other exhibits as well, including a special exhibit within their coin collection on the evil emperors of Rome, which ended with a truly delightful quote. “In conclusion, one might think that the good emperors end up in heaven, while the bad emperors end up in Hollywood.” 

The Surprising
MAK (Museum of Applied Arts)
The Museum Fur Angewandte Kunst aka the Museum of Applied Arts aka the MAK was one of the highlights of my trip. The museum focuses on applied arts, which are effectively everyday objects that people either used or would decorate a home. Vases, fabric, furniture, carpets, things like that. There were some excellent exhibits, but the coolest thing about the museum is it didn’t just display art, but it interrogated and played with how museums display art. The MAK’s audiotour explained that how objects are displayed in a museum is a conscious choice and changes how we the audience/public perceive the pieces. They compared it to a haircut - the face doesn’t change but it does make a person look different. As a result, a number of the rooms played with how things were displayed, making the display itself an art installation.

A Japanese artist named Tadashi Kawamata did an installation for the museum’s Asia room, creating a room divided up to create little corridors between pieces with rough, unfinished wood and clear glass and the descriptions of the pieces were handwritten by members of the museum staff on the glass itself. Another room displayed Art Nouveau chairs but instead of displaying the chairs themselves, the chairs were behind a white cloth and backlit so that what you saw instead was the shadow silhouette of the chair on the cloth. It was very meta, but in the best way.  

The Food
Going in, I had no real concept of Austrian food. I’d hear of Weiner schnitzel, but as a vegetarian of course that meant nothing to me at all. I assumed I’d be fine as a vegetarian and that they have good wine and that was about it. But the food was by and large really good! There were vinegary salads (something I like, for the record), excellent potato pancakes, and spaetzle, which were great, but I also had vegetable strudel and tartines, something that was basically a giant spring roll filled with cabbage, and, one day, a delicious lentil stew. And normally I kind of hate lentils. If a random café can make me like lentils, you’re doing an excellent job cuisine-wise.

The Imperial Silver Collection
I honestly wasn’t sure how the former Habsburg Imperial Silverware was able to be an entire museum. It was included in the ticket to the Sisi Museum and Imperial Apartments so I felt obligated to check it out. And it was surprisingly interesting. Despite the name, the museum contained all kinds of baking/cooking apparatuses, porcelain dishes (some of which are still used for state dinners), linens, and yes, silverware. The ticket came with an audio guide, and it and the placards were filled with tons of extremely detailed information.  

I will say, hearing how the Habsburgs ate almost exclusively on gold or silver plates for most of the 1700s and at one point had 20-30 dishes in a dinner every day was disturbing to my plebian soul on many levels. But extreme inequality aside, it was far more interesting than I would have thought and definitely worth the time to visit.

The Meh
Pastries
Going into my trip I literally prepped myself mentally for gaining a few pounds due to eating pastries in Austria. The country is known for them after all. Sacher Torte and Apple Strudel are the two most famous, but there are plenty of others. And yet – all the pastries I had were merely fine. They provided me with sugar but by and large I was unimpressed. It was often dry or underwhelming or both. I had crepes with apricot jam which were good but the rest were simply meh.

Naschmarkt
Maybe it was me, and maybe it was because markets are less exciting with COVID, but I found Vienna’s famed outdoor market, the Naschmarkt, underwhelming. The market is effectively a long thin strip of space in between two streets, a bit narrower than a block itself, and has a combination of stalls and little restaurants. One of my friends who studied abroad in Vienna said she found it a great place for people watching, but it was pretty empty when I was there, either because it was a weekday afternoon, COVID, or both. Granted, I did get a lovely cheese plate and some wine while sitting outside, but other than that I was underwhelmed.

Conclusion
I had an amazing time in Vienna and Melk and highly recommend going there. It wasn’t a magically perfect trip by any means. The price of tea was exorbitantly high (5.90 euro for a single pot of tea in some places!), the baroque architecture and décor the city is famous for was a bit much for my tastes, and there were a few times the crowds in museums made me anxious and claustrophobic. Like with Savannah, I don’t feel any real need to go back to Austria. But I had a fantastic (and safe) time there and highly recommend that everyone visits at least once. It’s worth your time.