Autumn 2019: Vienna: Episode 4

As we know all good things must come to an end, as do quite a few crappy ones too. But did this mean that I was just going to sit around the hotel room and mope all day instead of getting out there again? Well, to be honest, when I did my weather check this morning and found that the temperature at 9 am in Vienna was 1 degree above zero, the thought did cross my mind. But your Dave is made of sterner stuff than that, gentle reader, and so putting on two layers of clothing under my coat, I set off to brave the elements. Which might perhaps explain why the zip of my coat bust as I sat down on the first U Bahn train of the day. Brownie points to me for not deciding to write the whole day off after this ill omen, I think. 

So, where to first? Well, my 72 hour travel pass would be running out in a couple of hours, and so it made sense to me to get another 24 hour pass first. After all, by the time this one runs out at about half nine tomorrow, I plan to be in the airport. So a train and a tram ride took me to the Schonbrunn, so that I could tick off another one in my I Spy book of Viennese Palaces. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind betting that Vienna can boast one of the world’s highest rates of PPHP ( palaces per head of population). This one, the Schonbrunn, was supposedly the favourite residence of the penultimate Emperor of Austria, the famous Franz Josef. It weighs in at a measly 1441 rooms, but then it was only supposed to be the Habsburgs’ summer palace, so they can be forgiven a little. Interesting man, Franz Josef. You have to feel sorry for the fact that his only son, Rudolf, shot himself in a suicide pact with his mistress at the Mayerling hunting lodge, and his wife was shot dead by an anarchist in Italy. Mind you, that has to be tempered with the knowledge that even if the decision to take the actions which led to the First World War were those of his ministers, he seemed pretty happy about them. And the fact that he greeted the news of the assassination of his heir, Franz Ferdinand, by saying that this was an act of God tends to mitigate against that much sympathy. 

The Schobrunn manages the tricky feat of being monumental in scale, and at the same time being elegantly beautiful. I did consider making a sketch of it, and I wouldn’t have minded taking a walk through the gardens, and having a go at the maze. I do like a maze. However it was such a misty and murky old morning, as well as being absolutely cold enough to freeze der balles off ein messing-affe

which put paid to that idea. Instead, I took a long tram ride to Schottentor. When I’d passed through on the tram sightseeing tour a couple of days ago we’d been shown a very tall church, supposedly inspired by Cologne Cathedral. By this time the weather had reached the balmy height of 6 degrees, and so I quickly sketched the one you can see. You can’t miss it. It’s the one with the church in it. I don’t know why, but for some reason I must have decided that the place was the Karlsplatz. Wrong, he Karlsplatz is several stops along the tram line. Never mind.

I was getting hungry by the time that I finished the sketch, and luckily there was a Chinese fast food stand by the tram stop. Well, I say Chinese. To be honest, serving fried battered chicken and chips in a noodle box, with chopsticks doesn’t really make it a Chinese meal in my book. What the hell. I’d like to say it was delicious, but that would be an utter lie. The food itself was great, but they insisted, despite my protestations, in covering the chips with half a ton of salt. What’s that? No, of course I didn’t throw it away. There’s people starving in this world, you know.

 Off the point completely, I realise now that it’s high time that I mentioned the scooters.

To put it simply, the Viennese do seem to have a thing about scooters. And when I say scooters, I’m not referring to little motorbikes, but to the stand on it and scoot along with your foot type. I wouldn’t say that they are quite as popular here as bikes are in Amsterdam, but it’s not that far off. They’re everywhere, and people even take them onto the U Bahn with them. There’s even a scheme whereby you can rent an electric scooter all over the city, reminiscent of the old Boris Bikes in London. Could it catch on here? Well folks, just remember that you heard it here first.  

Now, you remember I said about the Natural History Museum? When? Oh, do pay attention, 007. In Tuesday’s post I mentioned that I was going to have a look at the Natural History Museum when I’d finished at the Kunsthistorisches, but having spent 4 hours in the latter I decided to give it a miss and postpone it until today. Well, I’ll be honest with you, I was in two minds about whether I really wanted to visit today, but in the end I was so glad that I did. Right, allow me a little digression here. I was once told that all men have a thing. Oooh, Matron. No, it was in an INSET day in school, and the remarkable thing isn’t so much that I remember this from more than a decade ago, but that I still remembered it when I walked out of school on the same day. How should I put this – the number of memorable INSET days I’ve found the least bit memorable in my 3 decades of teaching can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And two of the fingers aren’t needed for the counting either. Still, I remember on this particular day there were two trainers from outside, one of whom was a qualified medical doctor, and he was talking to us about stress. And he said that all men have a thing, that is, a consuming interest into which they put a huge amount of whatever time and energy they are left with outside of school. Well, gentle reader, I’m lucky enough that I’ve had several things in my lifetime. Behave yourself. But the first one that I can remember, the first all consuming interest that I can remember having, was dinosaurs.

I was already heavily interested the first time that my Mum took me as a very small boy to visit the Natural History Museum, and I can still remember the excitement of walking though the doors into that magnificent hall and seeing Dippy the Diplodocus in all of his glory. Incidentally, he’s in Cardiff at the moment. So while it wasn’t quite the same excitement, I still loved seeing the dinosaur exhibits in the Vienna Museum today. I sketched a triceratops skull– another of my favourites – while getting some very funny looks from other visitors. Well, look, nobody was stopping anyone else from taking photos, so I can’t see what the problem was with making a sketch. Or as you can see, two sketches.

Why the dodo? Well, the fact was that I couldn’t get a good enough vantage point to sketch the Dippy clone – like Dippy this is a plastercast of the original fossil donated by Andrew Carnegie. The dodo is interesting anyway. Poor sods. Put yourself in their position. You’re king of the island of Mauritius, with no predators to worry about, then a boatload of Portuguese sailors hoves into view. They give you a name which means stupid (although this is disputed – some would have it that the word dodo comes from the Dutch for Fat Bottom. Charming) Within a hundred years or so of the first settlers on Mauritius, you’re all gone. In fact, gone so completely that the last known stuffed dodo was destroyed in a fire in the Oxford Museum, and only a couple of bits remain to be seen. If you’re looking for a symbol of the impermanence of things, it’s a pretty good one. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair. 

When I came out of the Museum, mentally patting myself on the back for having taken the plunge and gone in, I had one self imposed task left. On Tuesday when I’d finished in the Museum I’d walked into the centre through the Hofburg, and taken a bite to eat in the Burggarten, where I’d seen the rather wonderful Palm House, which you can see in one of the sketches with this post. At first glance it looked to me like the sort of place from which you’d expect a Jules Verne airship to emerge. Dating from the first couple of years of the 20th century, what we’d maybe call Art Nouveau is called Jugendstil here. Quite ironic really. Jugendstil translates as something like young style, the irony being that nowadays old style would probably be more accurate. I love it.  

Wherever the sun had been all day, it had now set, and with my coat flapping open, and my hands moaning about the cold, I set off back to the hotel. When I opened the door to my room, something struck me as not being quite right. Nothing had moved while I’d been out. Everything was exactly where I’d left it. Then, at about half past six, there was a knock at the door. A very nice lady, with a cleaning trolley, spoke to me in German, and then, in English, asked if I’d like my room cleaned. At half past six. In the evening. I considered giving a sarky reply, but merely shook my head and said Nein danke. Which I guess was exactly what she was hoping that I’d say, considering the way she went skipping along the corridor to the next room.  

So that’s it, dearly beloved. My flight is at 11:05 tomorrow morning, and my aim is to be in the airport by 9. So no time for more foolishness tomorrow. Thanks for being with me, and if you’ve enjoyed it at all, then why don’t you come back for the Spring 2020 edition from . . . ah, that would be telling! Auf wiedersehen.

Autumn 2019 - Vienna Episode 3

Now look, I know that you’re all itching to hear about the tram museum, aren’t you? Well, all good things come to those that wait. Let us first, though, begin with the Hundertwasserhaus. Gesundheit. 

I set out at 9 this morning, and, knowing that the aforementioned tram museum doesn’t open until 10, I walked for about 20 minutes to see a rather rum concoction called the Hundertwasser House. You can see it in the sketch, and I have to say that the sketch doesn’t really do justice to how odd it actually is. The House was the brainchild of artist Friedenreich Hundertwasser. After making a number of television programmes outlining his views on architecture, he was invited in 1977 by Leopold Gratz, then the Mayor of Vienna, to design an apartment block.
His working relationship with the architect Joseph Krawina was stormy to say the least. I’m not surprised, mind you. I can just imagine what some of their conversations might have been like:-
“So then Fred, let’s talk about some of these ideas you want to incorporate into the house.”
“Ja, ja, all ist gut.”
“Now, you want as many roof gardens as is humanly possible?”
“Nein.”
“Nine? Oh well, it seems a bit excessive, but I’m sure we can – “
“Nein. No. Not gardens. Forests.”
“I see. Roof forests. And while we’re on the subject of roofs . . . an onion dome. On a skyscraper. What’s that all about?”
“The onion as der symbol of life itself, the tawdry outer layers, yet with each new layer unwrapped we come closer to der shining pearl of understanding. . .”
“Hmm. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, Fred, but have you seen a doctor recently?”
In the end the house was finally opened in 1985, although it took a court case ending in the noughties to have Krawina recognised as its co-creator. 

The house really is a most remarkable looking thing. What you can’t see in the sketch is around the other side where the entrances on the ground are all rounded – not an angle in sight, and look like the kind of place you’d see Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry emerging from. Well, on a sunny day, anyway. On a murky day like today, Smaug seemed more of a possibility. In all fairness I should probably mention that the house is an extremely popular tourist attraction, and by the time I finished my sketch, it was absolutely thronged with camera happy tourists.  

Today was a cold day in Vienna, colder than yesterday, and the wind was cutting. So I dashed off that sketch in about 30 minutes, and then sought the nearby U Bahn station and rode the train the two stops it took to get me to the Remise tram museum.

What can I say? I loved it. Now, when it comes to museums, I’m not that fussy – as opposed to art galleries. I like them all, but especially I like them if they tell a story, and the Remise definitely told a story. Yes, it was the story of the Vienna tram system, but in essence this was also the story of Vienna in the 20th century, and it was a story that I probably learned more about here than anywhere else I’ve been in Vienna. The museum is illuminating about the struggles Vienna faced after the peace treaties after world war I, and is also quite candid and honest about the period between the Anschluss with Hitler’s Germany and the end of World War II, for example. 

I sat down, and made the sketch you can see with this post. To me this shouts from the rooftops that it’s a product of the 50s – at one point Vienna had some trams which had been scrapped from New York running in the post war period, and I’m sure you can see the influence in this. 

It was while I was sketching that a very nice Hungarian lady with a large brood of children in tow came and sat down. The kids were bouncing – literally in the case of one who was sitting on the other end of my bench, and the way they started to unpack a picnic gave me a hint that they weren’t going to be getting up any time soon. How do I know they were Hungarian? Well, she started talking to me about the sketch, and my lack of understanding of German or Hungarian led to a longer conversation. Her family lives in Budapest, and they had just come for the day because one of the boys loves trams. I predict he’ll go far. The round trip is between 3 and 4 hours apparently. We did actually get onto the subject of Brexit, which she summed up rather succinctly with,
“Well, we do have some stupid people in Hungary too.” I couldn’t top that and so I didn’t try. 

It was about a 20 minute walk back to the hotel, which kept me from freezing, and gave me the opportunity to put on another layer of clothing. The day had already been a great success, and I wanted to maintain it as much as possible. So the next step was to take a tram from Schottentor U Bahn station to the Belvedere Palace. Alright, I know that this has been a bit of a tram-heavy episode so far, but I’m just trying to tell it like it is. And I have to say, that with the sun out, standing in the back of the tram in the standing only area as it trundled along the Ringstrasse just left me with a massive grin on my silly old face. I can’t help it.  

As for the Belvedere, well, that was the second museum of the day. Put simply, the Belvedere is a palace built as the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy. However, what we’re interested in about it today, is that the Upper Belvedere – the main palace – is the home of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. I think it’s probably fair to say that The Kiss is, along with Mozart, one of Vienna’s real star turns. Never mind all the other great paintings in the museum, the signs, which direct you to it, make it perfectly clear that most people are there for Klimt’s greatest hit. And it is a wonderful painting, no doubt. But what was just as interesting was looking at some of Klimt’s other work, and seeing just what a great traditional portrait painter he was as well. Of all of his paintings, though, even more than The Kiss I was drawn to his Judith. This is a painting I’ve seen reproductions of, but never knew it was supposed to represent Judith of Judith and Holofernes fame, nor that she is actually holding the severed head of Holofernes. Incredible.  

With tempus busily fugiting, I left the Belvedere, and headed back on the tram to try to squeeze in another sketch. This time I got off opposite the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which you may recall from yesterday’s episode, and walked along to the Hofburg, where I sketched the geegee carriage. I did wonder whether one horse was asking the other how the accordion recital had gone the day before. 

I treated myself to a melange – a Viennese coffee – on the way back to the U Bahn, which was well needed since the light had faded by this time, and the clearness of the sky suggested that it was probably going to get a lot colder any time soon. So there we have it, dearly beloved. A very good day indeed, and one more full day left. Tune in tomorrow to see where Fortune – and the U Bahn – takes us. Goodnight Vienna.

Autumn Vienna - Episode 2

Well, I won’t lie to you, after posting the first episode on Facebook, I was thus fully invigorated, and headed out to the first museum visit of the trip. Whenever I’m making a trip like this, one thing that I always really enjoy is leaving the hotel in the morning, and heading off to the tram/bus stop, or the Metro station, with a basic plan for the day, but no real idea what it might have in store. I like that very much. Of course, seeing other people all off on their way to work just adds to the pleasure. We call that schadenfreude. Mind you, so do the Viennese.  

Which brings me to the question I failed to answer yesterday, namely, why was Vienna at the top of my bucket list? Well, partly, it was because I’d enjoyed Prague, 3rd city of the old Austro Hungarian Empire, and Budapest, 2nd city of the old Austro Hungarian Empire so much when I visited them in 2017 that I just had to visit the number 1 as well. But it’s more than that. Vienna is just a place which kind of associates itself with pleasures. You don’t believe me? Well, give yourself a couple of minutes to add words to ‘Viennese’ in order to make phrases. See what you come up with. What did I tell you? Viennese waltz, Viennese fancy/whirl, Viennese coffee, and of course, the daddy of them all, Walls’ Viennetta. All wonderfully light and sweet confections. Add to that the fact that Vienna was where two of my heroes, Mozart and Klimt lived and worked in important periods of their lives, and maybe you can start to see the appeal. Or failing that, have a look at the sketch I made of the outside of the Kunsthistorische Museum this morning. Any city which houses a world class art gallery in a building like that gets my vote.  

In front of the building is a very imposing ornamental fountain. In case you don’t recognise the lady in the statue on top, that’s the Empress Maria Theresa. You might not have heard of her, but you’ve probably heard of her daughter, Marie Antoinette, who came to fame through her starring role in the Great French Head Off, after her ‘Let them eat cake!’ material went down like a lead balloon with the sans culottes.  

So, it was 9:30 when I arrived, and thought I might as well get my ticket from the booth outside even though it would be half an hour before the museum opened for me to go in. Or so I thought. Actually if you paid a few extra Euros to see the Caravaggio and Bernini exhibition currently showing in a Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum near you, then you could go straight in any time after 9. Well, I have to be honest, while I appreciate the consummate skill of Bernini, I can’t say that I would have paid extra just for him – if I were tempted to let my inner philistine out he’d probably say that if you’ve seen one statue of a naked man with his meat and two veg hanging out, you’ve seen them all. However, Caravaggio, now that’s a different matter. It was a

terrific exhibition, and very informative too, and when I came to the end of it, two hours had passed. I was tempted to move on to pastures new at this point, but I’m so glad I didn’t. The actual gallery itself, on the first floor, is exceptionally good, and I was taken by the Brueghels (ouch). Sorry, last genitalia based quip for the night, I promise. No, but seriously, probably the best work of Peter Brueghel the Elder is on display there, including the peasant wedding, and my own favourite, The Tower of Babel. Looked at the watch and another two hours had gone, and so I left the gallery. 

The original plan for the day had been to visit the Kunsthistorische Museum first, and then the Natural History Museum which was immediately opposite, after. However having tomorrow and Thursday in Vienna as well, I didn’t want to risk being all museumed out before I’d had a good look inside it, and so that’s on the agenda for Thursday now. This left all the more time to sketch the two wallies wearing animal heads who were playing the accordion outside the museum. I think they were meant to be horse’s heads, though I’m not sure, and if you look at the sketch I made at the time they look more like dogs. Cue joke about them playing Bach. I’m here all week, ladies and gents. Well, anyway, I would have to say that they were by far the best annoying-instrument playing animal impersonators I saw all day (the ferret playing the kazoo was rubbish).  

So, following that, I walked to the nearest tram stop and took a ride to nowhere in particular. Why? Hmm, have you never read any of my posts before? A) because it was a tram, and b) because I bought a 72 hour travel pass yesterday and I like getting my money’s worth. I eventually ended up by the Schottentor U Bahn station. That’s Stubentor and Schottentor, but sadly there’s no station named after Skeletor. So, back to the Stephanplatz to tackle the big one. I knew that sketching any part of the Stephansdom - Cathedral of St. Stephen – was going to take time, and only having a couple of hours of decent daylight left, if I was going to do it today, then I was going to have to get on with it. Now, when you look at the sketch at the bottom of the page, you might be thinking – where’s the rest of it? – I deliberately picked on the small tower since I thought that there was the possibility I would be able to finish the sketch in a reasonable amount of time. If you consider that this is the smallest tower, then you might just get an idea of just how huge and intricate the whole cathedral is.  

So I picked my spot, sat down and started. Along came a spectator. I believe that she was Japanese, and I’ll explain why in a minute. A spectator who was just one of a large party, so it turned out. For the first 20 minutes or so it was okay, since there was nothing much on the page for anyone to see.

However, as the sketch began to take shape, Nice Old Dear San began calling over other members of the coach party to come and have a look. And when they did in their dribs and drabs, they invariably reached the conclusion that the best place to stand and look at me sketching was between me, and my view of the cathedral. And the worst thing about it was that they were so nice and polite about it, through the universal language of the thumbs up, that I didn’t even have the opportunity to curse them all under my breath in case one of them did speak (rude) English. I said that I deduced that they were Japanese, mainly through the rhythm of their speech. I don’t understand Japanese or any Chinese language or dialect, but in my experience the sound and the rhythm of the languages are very different. So when the party finally left, I showed my relief by acknowledging their waves with ‘Arigato’, and none of them looked particularly askance. 

It’s not impossible that they were driven off by the cold. If you look at the records it will doubtless tell you that the temperature in Vienna late this afternoon was maybe just below 10 degrees. (Yes, I have checked). Not really at all cold. Well, the wind chill factor must have been high, because by the time I’d done all I felt I could reasonably do with the light now fading, I realised that I was absolutely frozen. That’s the thing with sketching, you see. I can get totally absorbed while I’m making my sketch. While I’m making the sketch, I won’t notice anything, not cold, not hunger, not thirst, in fact nothing except very polite Japanese tourists standing in the way. That’s okay when you’re making quick sketches. But my sketches have got slower and slower over the last couple of years. So the upshot is that when I stopped sketching, I started shivering. Badly shivering. In fact, I probably looked like the two kids I drew who were dancing outside the museum to the strains of Eine Kleine Krap Musik. Which is why I headed back to the hotel, where I am now. I’m fine now, but very foot weary so I’ll probably not go out again tonight.  

So, what’s on the agenda for tomorrow? Oh, please, dearly beloved. Tomorrow is Mittwoch! Tram Museum! Yay! Well, I’ve enjoyed this episode – somebody had to, after all. Shall we do it again tomorrow? Same time? See you then.

Autumn 2019: Vienna: Episode One

Good morning, hello and welcome to the first episode of the Autumn 2019 edition of An English Fool Abroad with his Sketchbook. This time we’re in . . . Vienna! Yes, dearly beloved, it’s another bucket list destination. Why was I so keen to come to Vienna particularly, though? Well, we’ll come to that.

So, my daughter Jenn offered to drive me to the airport yesterday morning. Then her partner, James, an all-round good egg, reminded her that he goes to Swindon first thing on a Monday morning, and so I slept at Jenn’s on Sunday night, and James drove me to the airport yesterday morning. By half past 5. Yes, I know, normally getting up at 4 in the morning would knacker me as far as the rest of the day was concerned, but actually I’d gone to bed really early at Jenn’s and for about the only time I can remember, it worked, and I had a really good night’s sleep. 

In fact most of yesterday was like that. Let me give you an example. Have a look at the pictures at the bottom of the page. Notice anything? How dare you! No, what I meant was that I didn’t make a sketch in the airport. The reason? I didn’t have time to get bored which meant I didn’t have to sketch. Now, I know that there are many out there who won’t believe it but this next bit is true. My Easy Jet flight did not leave at the advertised time. No. It left a few minutes early. Then the non priority passengers such as myself were ushered onto the plane at exactly the same time as the priority passengers. Then I boarded the plane and found that without paying any extra, I had been given a seat towards the front right beside the window. It was as if I had entered some weird parallel dream world in which things worked out exactly as they were supposed to. Well, if that was the case, then 5 minutes into the flight the real world suddenly took over. There was this kicking on the back of my seat. Kick kick kick. I sat up indignantly, and turned round, and there was a very young mother with a very young toddler, smiling apologetically at me. No, as it happened, I didn’t demand that the cabin crew provide them with parachutes and eject them over the south coast. I sat down and put up with it.  

So, we arrived in Vienna about 15 minutes ahead of schedule, and I had no problem locating the driver for my transfer to the hotel. He smiled, which is always a good sign, I think, even though he was expecting a chap called Clark David, and when I asked if he minded if I went to the information desk to buy a 72 hour travel pass he shrugged his shoulders, and replied, “Sure. We have to wait half an hour for the others, anyway.” Not actually his fault, but a combination of my early arrival, and a late Easy Jet arrival from Dublin created the delay where there should have been none. Good old Easy Jet. If they can’t get you one way, they’ll get you another. 

Well, anyway, the very nice Irish couple we were waiting for and I were all staying at the same hotel, and as we chatted I found out that one of them was the very best kind of schoolteacher to be, that is, a retired one. My first impression of the ladies in reception was that they were very professional, an impression only slightly dented by the fact that even though I had printed proof that my room had been booked under my name, they still asked why I wasn’t Jenniffer. This time it took about a second or two to clear that up. Check in wasn’t until 3, but at least they gave me a pass to the luggage room, and so, having dumped my bag, armed only with sketchbook and kindle I set off to make a preliminary exploration of the city. 

I don’t know if she did it deliberately, but Jenn had booked me into a hotel which was only a 15 minute walk away from the Vienna Tram Museum. Sensible girl. It was with a sense of gratitude that I walked along to the museum, only to find out that it only opens on Mittwoch, Samstag and Sonntag. I believe that means Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. It certainly didn’t mean Monday, anyway. So that’s the first activity for tomorrow pencilled in. Only slightly daunted I decided that I was going to get a tram fix today anyway, and a metro fix while I was at it, and as the Untergrundbahn Station was only a short walk away I took the U Bahn to Schweden Platz station. Incidentally, I did play the Meaning of Liff - what do the names of the stations mean game. Or tried to. The only one I came up with was Stubentor – a very short Transformer.

 Schweden Platz is so named because after the First World War, Austria was in a bit of a state. In fact it was in a lot of a state. Without going into too much detail, the division of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire in the peace treaties left Austria with a capital, Vienna, far too big, and with far too great a population to support. After the war, Sweden took thousands of Viennese children to Sweden, fed them up, looked after them, and then sent them back to Vienna. In gratitude, the people of Vienna named the Schweden Platz thus in their honour. Nice.

 Of course, I was more interested in the Schweden Platz because it was the place to catch the Ringstrasse tram tour. This is the rather lovely old tram in the picture. The Ringstrasse is the inner ring road of the capital, and reading my guidebook it tends to divide the cities sights between those within it, and those without it. Quite a nice little tour as well, and it was one of those which give you free headphones for the commentary. It only lasted about 25 minutes, but one thing it did prove to me, which is Vienna does have a thing about Mozart. Walking around later, it occurred to me that in the centre of Vienna certainly, it can be quite difficult to get away from poor old Wolfgang Amadeus. On the tram, whenever the lady doing the commentary stopped talking, her voice was replaced by the strains of Eine Kleine Tram Musik. Later, when wandering around the old town, it was pretty difficult to escape from the gifted one’s painted phizzog on shop signs. All of which did strike me as slightly ironic, considering that Mozart wasn’t treated quite so well in Vienna when he was actually in the land of the living. Tellingly, the commentary made the point that although Mozart was born in Salzburg, he lived and worked in Vienna for the last 10 years or so of his life, and is buried in Vienna. – Ah yes – I thought to myself smugly – but I bet you can’t tell me where his grave is, knowing full well that he was given a pauper’s burial in a communal grave, and so we just don’t know exactly where his remains lie.

 Still, I enjoyed the tram tour. From the Schweden Platz it wasn’t a long walk into the Old Town and the Stephansplatz. The Stephansplatz is so named after the Cathedral of St. Stephan, the biggest church in Vienna, and one of the tallest churches I have ever seen. This is ecclesiastical architecture of the shock and awe variety, and I probably quite wisely decided that it is not a building to tackle sketching on your first day in Vienna. My neck is already stiff just from thinking about how to reduce it to fit it onto paper. Watch this space. From there, though, it’s just another short walk to the Museum Quarter, with the world famous Spanish Riding School, and more museums than you can shake a stick at. I will admit that I did have a fit of the giggles when I saw that one of them was called the Sissi Museum. This is apparently dedicated to the life of the Empress Elisabeth, the consort of Franz Joseph, Sissi being her nickname rather than his description.  

So, back to the hotel to check in. I was standing by the reception at 2 minutes to 3, mentally daring the receptionist to ask me to wait for 2 minutes. She didn’t. She did, however, ask me to fill in the same form I’d filled in earlier, and then again ask me where Jenniffer was, but again, this was all cleared up fairly easily. So up to the very nice room for unpacking, and a breather. 

I had a nagging sense in the back of my mind that I’d forgotten something, and that took shape, and the shape it took was that of a Ferris Wheel. I knew I’d have plenty of time to see the famous Ferris Wheel in Prater Park on another day, but what the hell, I wanted to see it then and there. So, back to the U-Bahn, this time to Prater Stern station. Prater Stern, incidentally, is a perfect phonetic rendition of the correct official response to the words “Piers Morgan is in the boat behind yours”. If like me you’ve ever seen the film, “The Third Man” it’s very difficult to not hum the Harry Lime theme the first time you look at the famous wheel, and I couldn’t resist as I made the sketch you can see here. I had to work quickly because the sun had already set and the light was fading. I was a little surprised how relatively small it is compared with the London eye for example.  

So then, after a wander through the park, then back to the hotel. The closest U Bahn station to the hotel is called Kardinal Nagl-platz, who incidentally is one of the regular characters in the Vatican TV version of Sesame Street. I wanted to pick up just a few bits and pieces from a nearby supermarket if I could find one. Now, let me ask you this. For the dedicated cheap skate such as myself, what would be the perfect discovery? That’s right, a Lidl right next door to the hotel. So I bought my bits, took them up to my room, took them back down again when the key didn’t work, went back to reception, thought about telling them that Jenniffer’s key wasn’t working but thought better of it, got a new key, and came back to the room. And having been overcome by fatigue, that’s pretty much where I’ve been ever since. So that pretty much concludes episode 1, gentle reader, and hopefully I’ll post episode 2 this evening. Guten Tag.