The Next Three Days in Vienna

We started with the typical Sunday in a religious town – closed businesses. There was one brunch place we found open called Schӧne Perle, which we went to again on Monday, since that was a religious holiday. After brunch on Sunday, we took public transportation to Kahlenberg, which is one of the highest points in the city. I have to say, the public transportation in Vienna was excellent. You bought one ticket you could use for the Metro, bus or train. And it was on the honor system – you didn’t have to go through a turnstile or anything. It was pretty efficient.

So we made it up the huge hill, only to discover the city was covered in fog. But one of the physicists from Cai’s conference told him about a trail we could take to reach a restaurant literally nestled in the hillside next to a vineyard. It’s been a long time since I’ve done any kind of hiking, and even though this was all downhill, the incline was probably the steepest I’ve ever walked. But we made it to the place called Mayer am Nussberg. We tried a little bit of everything on their menu, including the local wine which was delicious. And at this level, the fog began to clear and we finally got some great views of Vienna.

 

 

After lunch, we climbed down the rest of the way and took the bus and then the Metro back to the hotel. Thankfully we struck up a conversation at the station with the man sitting next to us about a sign in German we couldn’t read. He asked where we were going and when we told him, he said we were waiting for the wrong train! We caught the right train and waved our thank you to him across the track. 

 

That night we went to St. Stephens for pictures, and then met Cai’s friend, Marina, and her father, Klaus. They lived in Massachusetts for a couple years when Cai was in high school, and it had been 15 years since they had seen each other. We ate at an American restaurant called Sparky’s, which was filled with the most kitsch I’ve ever seen in a restaurant! Once again, the cheeseburger I got wasn’t that good, but the fries were fine. After dinner, when we were out walking, we did come across a section of the cobblestone that was fairly faded and had a plaque in front of it. Marina said the bricks were preserved from the 1200s, so we proceeded to "take a walk through history." :) Then we went our separate ways until Monday.

Following brunch the next day, we walked to Au Garten only a few blocks from the restaurant. It was a very pretty park, with a huge old bomb shelter sticking out in the middle of it. 

Then we checked out of the hotel and Marina picked us up to drive to her home in Groβschӧnau. We stopped for ice cream on the way, and I ordered the only thing I could understand on the menu – a banana split. 

We got to Marina’s place within a couple of hours and wandered around the grounds. Her apartment is the renovated part of an old castle, originally built in the 1500s. I felt like we were walking around in a fairy tale, crossing over little stone bridges, passing through heavy metal doors and wrought iron gates, standing in a courtyard abandoned by time, looking down a huge well, looking up at tower walls and windows. I could’ve taken my laptop anywhere, sat down, and not gotten up for hours while writing new stories about each room and piece of landscape we saw. It was incredible, and almost, dare I say, magical. Marina also told us that artists have set up shop in certain rooms in the tower in the past, and we found lots of remnants of newer things among the old.

That night we drank wine and ate the meat and cheese spread we had bought at the market. Marina found a yearbook from 2000 and she and Cai looked through it, bringing them back to high school all over again. It’s so funny – my friends and I have done that countless times, and Cai has had to sit there and listen to us drone on about old stories he wasn’t there for. This was the first time, in our 11-year relationship, that I’ve seen him do this. Marina apologized for me being out of the loop, and I told her I was happy that he was finally able to go through this kind of reminiscing.

On Tuesday, Marina left to pick up her daughters, Mariella, 8, and Annika, 11, while Cai cooked scrambled eggs and schinkenspeck (it’s like soft bacon). The girls spent most of the time in their room - Annika was learning English, so we spoke to her a little about things like favorite color, favorite food, etc. Mariella was a bit shy because she didn’t know much English yet. But we did find out why most people we met spoke English – everyone learns English in school, so it’s pretty common for people to be bilingual when they graduate high school. That night, Cai and Marina cooked a pasta dish with some of the leftover meat and cheese, and we continued with the wine theme from the previous night. She then showed us her heliograph table that she built with weights. 

As a hobby she creates these wonderful spiral pictures, and Cai and I even made our own picture together. He moved one of the legs one way and I moved the second leg a different way and we created this pattern:

It was pretty cool, because you could try to move the legs in the same motion to recreate a pattern, and you’d still get something different. It was a fun experiment in chaos theory. Cai even tried a couple tweaks to the table’s design to see what else they could draw. It was a fun end to the evening.