Vienna Austria
13-16 October, 2026
Austrian Airlines is the right airline to fly when coming to Vienna. They play Strauss waltzes during boarding and deplaning, which sets just the right tone for a visit. Then, at the airport, the speakers were playing a jazzy version of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Clearly, we arrived in Austria and not Australia.
We were going to take the train downtown to our Airbnb, but we would have had to wait 30 minutes for it to leave and then walk another 15 minutes from the station to our accommodation. For just €7 more than our combined train fares, we took an Uber, which delivered us right to the door. Boy, I love Uber.
Our first stop after dropping our bags off was the Upper Belvedere gallery. Its best-known painting is Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, but there were plenty of other works that we enjoyed as well.
Then we went to a restaurant Hannes had recommended called Figlmüller, whose speciality is Wiener Schnitzel. I once again proved to myself just how unworldly I am. I don’t think I’d ever quite put it together that Wiener means Viennese. So Wiener Schnitzel simply means schnitzel prepared in the Viennese style. The restaurant is famous for it, and most people seemed to order the schnitzel despite the many other choices on the menu.
For dessert, Hannes had recommended Kaiserschmarrn. The waiter described it as pieces of thick, fluffy pancake served warm with little pots of plum and apricot sauce. I looked at the timestamps on our photos and discovered an embarrassingly short interval between the before and after pictures.
Despite eating dessert, we’ve discovered a way to avoid the Fat 5. You may remember that this is the amount of weight you gain on safari. I have discovered since then that the Fat 5 rule applies to any vacation. The secret? Sarah and I order one portion and split it between two plates. Such a simple concept! It’s only taken 67 years to figure it out, although I really didn’t have to think much about my weight until sometime in my fifties. Thanks to cottage friends Nan and John for showing us the way.
To cap off the evening, we went to Karlskirche, a large 18th-century church, to listen to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The ensemble consisted of five violins, including a soloist, plus a viola, cello, double bass and harpsichord.
Sarah wasn’t particularly enamoured with the soloist, and I thought the acoustics were awful. The reverberation might have been wonderful for a large church organ, but it washed out much of the detail in the ensemble’s music. It took me a while to work that out. I think it was in Autumn that the orchestra played a loud passage, paused for a beat, and then repeated it more softly. But the reverberation caused by the loud passage hadn’t died away by the time the softer one began, so much of the detail was lost. That’s when I realized that everything was getting mushed together. Perhaps there was a place to sit for better acoustics, but wherever it was, we weren’t there!
On Wednesday, we went to the Spanish Riding School to watch the morning practice of the Lipizzaner horses. The actual performances are only on weekends, so we would miss those. It was nice to be in a place I’d seen in so many movies, videos and photographs over the years, but watching the horses walk and trot around the practice area was only mildly interesting to someone who attended the Calgary Stampede for 10 years.
In the afternoon, we went to Schönbrunn Palace, just outside central Vienna. It was every bit as opulent as the other palaces we’ve visited. But I’ll admit to having a bit of an attitude thinking about how a few people throughout history have managed to accumulate more than their share of the world’s wealth, whether through birthright, political power, force of arms or business acumen. It’s funny that I’ve never really thought about palaces that way before. I suspect the current US political climate and the tech billionaires have something to do with it. They’re never far from the top of my mind these days, and it is colouring my perception of the world.
In the evening, we went to the Vienna State Opera and saw Carmen. Spoiler alert: Carmen dies at the end! One novelty was a small touchscreen in front of our seats that displayed a translation as the singing progressed. It made the story much easier to follow, although perhaps knowing all the details isn’t a good thing because I very quickly had an opinion of what Don José should do. Micaëla would have been a far better choice for him. All she wanted to do was bring him home so his dying mum could hold him in her arms one more time, whereas Carmen clearly didn’t love him and was the kind of girl who worked in a cigarette factory and started fights. But then it would have been a short lived romantic melodrama rather than an opera that has been popular for 150 years. Georges Bizet chose correctly.
We sat in a box on the second tier on the left, which meant we could see only about two-thirds of the stage. Even so, the orchestra and performers were magnificent. And there were no problems with the acoustics, unlike Vivaldi the previous evening.
On Thursday, we went to the Albertina museum. In addition to the regular exhibits, there was a temporary exhibition featuring Picasso and Francis Bacon. I’m finally becoming less of a “black and white, everything fits in a square box” type of engineer. Many of the paintings had plaques explaining the stories behind them: what was going on in the artist’s lives or that moment in history, and what they were trying to express. They weren’t just paintings of noses in the wrong place or flowers in a vase. They were expressive poems written in colour on canvas. Huh. Maybe a course in art history is a worthwhile addition to an engineering curriculum
We also walked down to have a quick look at the Danube. It isn’t blue, despite Strauss telling us otherwise. But I feel our very short visit to Vienna is now complete. On Friday 16 October we leave for Dubrovnik.
Pictures coming!