Monday, June 20, 2016

Vienna/Wien

I drove from Hallstatt to Vienna and luckily had GPS Navigation to guide me. Although I love the challenge of driving in a new city I would be lost without GPS. Every street and every turn is new and I have to focus, which is one of the things I like about driving-it needs constant mental input and observation. I don't talk much as I am all eyes and ears to the new world I have found myself in.

Carol and Ciaran are excited by what they see. I see lines in the road and cars in my rearview mirror. I see red green and yellow traffic lights and Germanic roadsigns. I am excited by all of that.

Carol once asked me (in Berlin) how I could be so calm and confident driving in a strange city and my answer was- I just concern myself with driving 100 yards/metres at a time and (this comes from driving in the USA for 30 years) expecting other drivers to do the unexpected-which doesn't really happen in Germany or Austria.

We are staying in the Grand Hotel Wein, as always chosen by me from TripAdvisor reviews. A classic, elegant hotel offering great hospitality.







We were given a quiet room at the back of the hotel looking down on Mahlerstrasse from our large sixth floor balcony. It was the first hotel we stayed in which had a bedside phone that operated the lights and the curtains. It could also be used to make Phone calls!

One good reason for booking this great hotel was it's proximity to the Vienna Opera House just a five minute, slow stroll away. We had tickets to two shows. One was Wagner's "Siegfried" and the other an opera that doesn't get played very often- "Die Tote Stadt" (the Dead City) set in Bruges, Belgium and written by Erich Korngold, a favorite of ours.

Vienna Opera House


City and country tour buses run from just in front of the Opera. We took one of the city tours to get our bearings, passing the Prager, a huge park where the famous Ferris Wheel from the classic movie "The Third Man" was filmed and went as far as the Danube river before turning back towards the city center.

We spent two nights in the Opera House, seeing world-class performances. Here's a detail from the house at night.


And the rear of the house, where through open windows you could hear singers warming up their voices. Photo taken from the Cafe Sacher in the hotel of that name.


We found our morning breakfast place at the Opera House -the Opera Cafe, where we would sit outside and enjoy the wonderful coffee we were unfamiliar with-Josef Meinl coffee (which you can buy in Chicago, we later found) and some ham bread, eggs and cheese. A simple but filling meal to start the day.


This would give us the energy for our morning walks around the beautiful city streets

During on such walk Carol finds the location of the small hotel she stayed in when she visited Vienna with her mother over 30 years before. It was above the famous coffee house Cafe Hawelka.


There was a permanent exhibition of the artwork of Paul Klee, not someone whose work I enjoy but Carol does and so while Ciaran and I sat enjoying our cold beers on a sunny day she went to the museum.


We found the trams very useful and easy to use to move around such a vast city. There are also subway trains. The Audi was left to wait in the hotel garage for a couple of days.The red and gray tram is seen at left.


Carol used the tram to pay a visit to Belvedere Palace for a solo visit. These are her photographs.










Carol is the World's number 1 Mozart lover...


I was Palaced-out and chose instead to take an underground train out to an island, popular with the locals. Ciaran and I went to Donauinsel (Danube Island) an island in the river that is 13 miles long by 400 feet at it's widest, to sit by the water and drink beer, watching the tourist boats go by.

At the end of a day's sightseeing though we would be ready for a night of Opera...



More to come...











Sunday, June 12, 2016

Mirabell and Hallstatt

Mirabell Gardens was an easy walk from our hotel through parts of the city we hadn't walked before. Today's tourist buses were already in the town, letting off the tour groups but we got to the gardens before they arrived and spent a quiet half hour sitting to admire the view.

Although our two days in Salzburg were all too brief we did get to see and enjoy it after the tour buses leave around 6 pm. That's when the shops close and we could walk down narrow streets, seldom meeting another person as the sun went down. It was quiet and romantic, such a beautiful old town and a great re-introduction to Austria for all of us. We look forward to returning on our next visit to Austria, lured by the Vienna opera. We just don't know when that might be.






I found a bench 



At some point that morning we had to leave the Hotel Sacher and begin our drive to Vienna. We made a long detour to the Salzkammergut region to visit Hallstatt, and ancient salt-mining town we had seen Rick Steves visit on his American TV show.

Along the way we stopped by a lake so I could stretch my driving legs and enjoy the view.





I can't recall how long the drive took but would guess 90 minutes but I wasn't driving fast as the scenery and the rural roads made me take an easy relaxed pace. In the height of the summer tourist season one often has to park high above the town and walk down but in May I thought we'd have a chance of parking down at the level of the town so I kept on driving to the level of the lake.



 We were here to have lunch-a long way to go to an unknown restaurant but we wanted to eat somewhere relaxing and scenic. We had a long walk from the parking lot we found but the fresh air, hunger and the marvelous mountain scenery spurred us on. We found what was a restaurant with a very good kitchen and had a marvelous meal. Carol had fish that had been caught in the lake earlier that morning while Ciaran and I both had Weinerschnitzels (my favorite German dish and one I have never tired of)



A very pleasant experience and once fed we walked back to the car- destination Vienna. We spent maybe two hours in Hallstatt but again it is a place we hope to see again. We didn't have time to take a salt-mine tour, deep into the bowels of the mountain, nor to walk up into the precipitous narrow streets. Those have to wait for another time.




Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Salzburg

Although Salzburg is famous for two events in music; the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and it's prestigious annual classical music and Opera festival, neither of those were alive or running, respectively.

So we were here because of it's scenic beauty.

As always TripAdvisor had shown us a fine hotel by the Salsach River, just a short walk across a bridge to the Old Town where a rocky outcropping is crowned by a fortress.

After checking into our hotel and unpacking I walked with Ciaran to his hotel in the Old Town so by the time I returned the sun was low in the sky and bathing the fortress in "Magic Light".



Our room in the Hotel Sacher. The furnishings spoke of an earlier age which is fine by us as we don't look for "modern" in decor. It was a very elegant hotel and in the lobby had many photographs of the famous Opera singers and classical music conductors who had stayed there. Most importantly for us it was quiet and the service was stellar.



It was definitely 5 o'clock somewhere -maybe even in Salzburg, so I walked across the bridge to meet Ciaran who had already unpacked everything except his thirst for Austrian beer. We met in a quiet cobbled square in the old town and enjoyed our beer as dusk was settling in.

Carol is a lifelong Mozart fan whereas I don't listen to his music unless forced to. She was excited to be in his birthplace. As I sat opposite Ciaran reminiscing about an old dear friend who had died in Northern Ireland just a few days before I noticed at the end of the square a yellow house bearing the legend "Mozart Geburtshaus", indeed the home to the infant Wolfgang. Wait until Carol sees this !!

I called her on our rented Blackberry phones, rented so that we could keep in touch with Ciaran who was staying in a different hotel and told her where we were and would she care to join us? Care, she did and within 20 minutes was sitting beside Ciaran with her back to the Mozart crib, unaware.

It took quite a bit of hinting to get her to turn around and at first she didn't see the giant yellow building...then it hit her!

Next day she would visit the house and be enthralled at stepping on the same floorboards as her musical hero. She went alone.




The sun went down as we sat in a charming square in a beautiful little city on a warm May evening.
At some point, around 9 pm we needed to eat and right there was a rustic Austrian restaurant called
Zum Eulenspiegel. The restaurant was as old as Mozart and in fact his father and he had rented rooms here upon a time. Narrow staircases led up past small rooms filled with diners until we came to the top floor into a small cosy, ancient room. There we would be the only diners after the one occupied table paid their bill. Our table was against a small open window and outside and below us was the Salsach river reflecting the street lamps. With the room to ourselves we were able to relax and chat.

We ordered simple hearty dishes- roast pork with fried potatoes, sauerkraut and bacon and lashings of Steigl beer. For Carol baked salmon and fresh in-season white asparagus. An hour or two passed pleasantly by in the company of my favorite people.

We returned to the Sacher to sleep- a deep cavernous dark and uninterrupted 8 hours of unconsciousness until woken by the warm sun peeking through the heavy curtains. A day of glorious weather awaited us.


The hotel had one of the most elaborate breakfast buffets in our experience. Served in this room with windows looking out over the river.


Our plan today was to meet Ciaran at our hotel and then walk towards the base of the massive rock that supported the Fortress. Along the way we found a statue of Mozart in a sunny square.



And a fountain in another.



Although you can walk up a winding path to the Fortress we are not idiots or keen hikers and instead took a funicular tram up the steep incline.



The mountains in the distance are home to the town of Berchtesgaden, home to Adolf Hitler during World War II.



The beautiful environs of Salzburg


We spent a couple of hours in the Fortress which we simply used as a means to get a better view of the city. There were several outdoor cafes there where we enjoyed a simple lunch of Schnitzels and Beer while basking in the sun and taking in the natural beauty of Austria.

What goes up must come down and so we took the funicular back down to street level. We planned to return to the Fortress that evening for dinner and to see the city lit up but when the time came it looked like a thunderstorm was going to spoil our evening and we canceled our plans and instead walked around with our umbrellas at the ready and ate in a fancy atmosphere-less restaurant.



In the morning , after another wonderful breakfast in the hotel we took a walk and discovered that the house next to the hotel was the birthplace of another famous son of Salzburg-the most famous classical music conductor of the 20 th Century- Herbert Von Karajan.



Today we would drive onwards to Vienna for my first visit to that remarkable city. On the way I insisted we take a side trip to a scenic lake town I had seen on a Rick Steve's TV show-Hallstatt.

That's our upcoming lunch spot on our road-trip.

But first we wanted to sit a while in the beautiful Mirabell Gardens....