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Twenty years ago, I met an Austrian girl at a bus stop in Sydney. We spent 24 hours together. Then I moved to Vienna three weeks later. It was the middle of winter and the city was beautiful but bleak, like I’d landed in a black-and-white Ingmar Bergman film. I didn’t know a word of German. Not that it mattered; no one spoke to me anyway.
Vienna is easy to work out – just hop on a tram and go where it takes you. Credit: Amos Chapple / Stocksy United
I spent months exploring the place. Trams criss-cross this compact city, so I rode trams down every cobbled street, and walked until I was hopelessly lost, then tested myself trying to get home again (no GPS in those days). I discovered that – forget Paris – Vienna is Europe’s prettiest city. And yet, in these cloudy winter months, Vienna felt lifeless, like a museum, the cold turning its inhabitants into bears hibernating in their unbearably warm apartments.
The sun doesn’t set until after 9pm, so most nights I’d join thousands of them in the First District soaking up the long Viennese twilight.
CRAIG TANSLEYThen, one morning, summer arrived in Vienna with a rush of sunshine through my bedroom window. Sunshine that turned Vienna’s First District, its World Heritage-listed historic centre, into a non-stop carnival of film festivals, music concerts and food fairs.
The Viennese, I discovered, live an entire year in these few warm months. The sun doesn’t set until after 9pm, so most nights I’d join thousands of them in the First District soaking up the long Viennese twilight. There was always something on, and if there wasn’t, locals and tourists gathered on the lawns beside parliament, drinking wheat beer and their favourite white wine, grüner veltliner (the city seemed to have no laws prohibiting drinking in public, but I never saw anyone inebriated).
Bordered by one of the grandest and most famous boulevards of its kind anywhere in the world, the Ringstrasse, the First District is a giddy, colourful maze of baroque mansions, Italian Renaissance architecture and Greek classicism. I’d sit sunning myself with all the students in the Museums Quarter – an ensemble of museums, open-air cafes and bars inside former imperial horse stables. I’d ride the old red-and-white trams that circle the First District and stare out the window daydreaming, pretending this was still the 1800s.
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I didn’t catch a tourist bus or take a single tour because Vienna’s easy to work out – just hop on a tram and go where it takes you. I’d ride the number 43 tram to Grinzing, on Vienna’s outer fringes, then walk its cobbled streets past cafes, bars and restaurants with sun-filled gardens until I reached a hill strewn with vineyards which overlooks the entire city.
Vienna doesn’t have a pretty river as a feature, like Paris or Budapest. The Danube is unremarkable here, and flows beyond the city limits in any case. But what it lacks in water frontage, it makes up for in green spaces: half of Vienna is parkland, and a quarter of Vienna’s 2000 or so parks were once imperial gardens.
Winter eventually returned to Vienna and I never got over the shock of it. I didn’t make it through, moving instead to Australia with my Austrian partner. These days, I return for holidays, and the city’s summer magic never dims, not for a moment.
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