Our Adventures in Vienna with Constar

So, we had the pleasure of my mom's company for almost two weeks in mid-April. Constar hadn't been to Europe since the seventies, but she hit the ground running here in Prague. All in all, we had a blast. We ate some great meals, wandered the city, drank a few glasses of Moravian white wine (for those of you who know Connie well, you know that's a must!), and spent tons of time together. The undoubted highlight of my mom's visit, though, was our trip to Vienna.

I had been to the Austrian capital back in 1994, but remembered very little except for a huge ferris wheel in one of the city parks. I also remembered some little villages that clustered around the city and sold freshly made wines, but more on that later. In a word, Vienna is...imperial. Prague streets tend to be narrow and cobble-stone; it seems like the city has just grown up over the centuries and settled onto the landscape. If there ever was a plan for the city, it seems to have been change ten times (once for each century!). Vienna, however, seems planned - planned for imperial coronations, for victory parades, and for all the silly things that the Habsburg kings and queens wanted to do. There are formal gardens, palaces, and giant, neo-classical buildings (whether theaters, museums, churches, or governent buildings) everywhere. Even the central church, St. Stephen's, boasts the a 137m tall steeple. There's not much subtle about the downtown, that's for sure. It is gorgeous - there were tulips in bloom all over the city, and the gardens and grounds of the palaces are beautiful. We also stumbled into the Vienna University botanical garden, and were completely overwhelmed by the variety and beauty of the flowers. Although I prefer Prague (or even Berlin), Vienna was totally different and totally amazing.

Our favorite activities in the city were going to museums. The Kunsthistorisches Museum, which is across the street from the main palace in the city, the Hofburg, had an incredible collection of Italian and northern Renaissance paintings, along with antiquities from Greece, Rome, and Egypt. We spent a morning there, and could have probably spent more time. We all split up to see what we wanted at our own pace, and then joined up in the cafe for a quick lunch. We also hit up the museum at the Belvedere Palace (sorry the link's in German, but the pictures are great!) the next day - it had mostly nineteenth and twentieth century art, and a great collection of Gustav Klimt. The original of "The Kiss" is there, along with others of his works. We loved the Belvedere, and the grounds. Our final major stop in terms of big sites was the royal treasury at the Hofburg. We saw some ridiculous jewels, vestments, and relics there.

The touristy fun is only half of Vienna's charm, though. The city is justifiably famous for its coffee houses, and we chose Cafe Sperl for our first breakfast in the city. Sperl boasts that its decor is exactly the same now as it was at its opening in 1880, and I believe it. I would also believe that some of the waiters have worked there since 1880, too. Our coffee was ridiculous, as was breakfast, and it kept us going through a full day of site-seeing.

At the end of that day, though, we treated ourselves to a visit to the heurigen, small wine villages that cluster at the north end of Vienna on hillsides overlooking the city. We went to Grinzing and Nussdorf, and really enjoyed both. They serve several varieties of wine, notably Gruner Veltliner and Riesling, along with heurig, which means the most recent vintage of white wine. It's not meant to be aged, and is really easy to drink (i.e. low in alcohol, with a light body and not a ton of flavor). It was a bit too cold for us to enjoy sitting outside, but we had a blast each night. We particularly liked Nussdorf; we walked five minutes out of the central part of the village and were in the midst of the vineyards, and we also ate at a great brewery, Brauhaus Nussdorf.

Our final favorite from Vienna was the Naschmarkt; it's a place to buy fresh fruits, vegetables, and specialty foods from around the world. There were tons of places to pick up cheese, olives, vinegar, fresh meat and fish, or anything else you could want. While I won't wax rhapsodic about it like Danielle did for the Borough Market in London, it was pretty amazing. We stopped and ate Vietnamese for lunch (it was my mom's first time having it), and it was a perfect way to cap our trip.

So, the rest of my mom's visit was wonderful, but Vienna was the real highlight. We all got to see a new city and discover its sites, sounds, and smells. It was tough to see my mom go, but it's only a couple of months until we'll be back in the States. I think we all have enough memories from the trip to keep us going until July!