If I had a bucket list Vienna would have been on it. & somewhat tardy though I have been I finally got there in the end. Arriving without fanfare at the main train station it’s a case of dragging suitcases over cobbled streets to the tram stop. God I love the Trams. England used to have loads of ’em but we let them decline and fade away from the 1930’s. Instead we decided cars & buses were the way forward. What a shame.

I bought a travel pass online before arriving so all ready to go. The No. 44 tram runs every ten minutes from the centre of town to more or less outside the apartment block at Yppengasse. The journey isn’t much more than ten minutes either.

Two hundred metres from my abode is Yppenplatz. A funky square full of restaurants and bars. A fab saturday fruit & veg market, off the square a daily market that goes on forever, almost entirely Middle Eastern foods. Oh and live fish, bloody great big carp swimming around in a tank. I’m not ready for Carp just yet.

Austria is for the main part conservative, Vienna much less so, Yppenplatz is about as leftie as you can go, and I love it, it feels real. No pretence, no superiority complexes, just real people, in all colours. There are language classes for immigrants, NGO’s encouraging youth to make stuff, to learn, recycling joints, ( oh and the waft of a joint or two to be sure ), there are people with issues on the street, but it all blends seamlessly. It’s calm and comfortable and has the merest bit of an edge for added spice. Here I am happy. Walking late at night down half lit streets does not feel dangerous or even a bit iffy, crime rates are vastly lower than London, nasty crimes much lower. Maybe it was a false sense of security, but there weren’t even geezers on e-bikes anywhere I noticed stalking people at bus stops & nicking their mobiles handy. (look at me with the lingo).

So anyway, first thing each morning I take my coffees at a cafe on the square and then it’s off on the Tram to discover the delights of Vienna by day & by night.

Of course there is the art & the architecture & wonderful old cafes, the museums and restaurants – it’s enough to lose yourself in these, but just walking through the city is a pleasure.

In the old part of town I ended up in Shakespeare & Co, a great little bookshop, all in English, books crammed like sardines, like I need more books? I came away with a big bundle.

Round the corner is the Synagogue, thriving on a saturday afternoon, families spilling onto the street in their sabbath best. Armed Austrian cops are stationed at either end of the road and the Synagogue heavies don’t like people taking photos, but I knocked one off so to speak. The front of the building isn’t so grand, for Vienna at least, though the place is a bit of a Tardis, bigger on the inside and rather grand it seems.

Outside on the street alongside the synagogue is a large display of photos of Israeli citizens still held hostage in Gaza. There’s nothing about the plight of the Palestinians, but then that shouldn’t surprise me, but oh how the wheels of time turn in mysterious ways.

There are many many fine buildings in Vienna, surprising really when you know that at least 30% of the city was seriously damaged or totally destroyed by allied bombs in WW2. Hell I even passed a high street pharmacy with art-nouveau mosaics on the side of the building.

& don’t get me started on the Art. I am a sucker for the two decades before and after 1900, the art, music, the explosion of thinking, the writers, the development in philosophy, psychoanalysis, science, they all collided in Vienna. Seeing Klimt or Schiele or Kokoschka works in the city they were created is fab. Taking a coffee in the same marble palace of a coffee house where Freud was a regular, is bloody cool.

And the consumables: There are stops for strudel, breaks for beer, pre-dinner drinks, drinks during dinner and post dinner cocktails. I have developed a taste for Negroni. I hope to pursue it for a long time to come. There was Weiner schnitzel & Goulash, sausages galore. sausages with cheese inside? One evening a trip to a restaurant out in the burbs owned by a winery – it’s a thing in Austria apparently, the big vineyards have restaurants where you drink their wine & they feed you. Real Austrian fare, none of your foreign muck. And it’s all delicious.

I soon became convinced I had put on 10 kg between Italy & Austria.

After one particularly large evening meal it was off to the Prater amusement park. There amongst all the other rides is the Ferris wheel, the Wurstelprater. Turning since 1897 & two-hundred and thirteen feet high. It’s featured in several movies, including the Bond Film The Living Daylights. Bond gets to go round with Maryam D’Abo lucky him you might think. Nothing of the sort, my companion was far prettier.

I could mention the Balkan Bar & the music night, or swimming in the Danube, or how sad it felt to say goodbye to Vienna, but instead I will just mention the Burg Kino, reputedly Viennas oldest continually operating picture-house.

It has The Third Man playing every Sunday evening ( In English ) & on Tuesdays in German.

This is a fab way to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday night in Vienna. A B&W British movie made in 1949, written by Graham Greene with a great cast & post war Vienna backdrops ( it was cheaper to film the movie in Vienna & the bombed damaged city is a star in itself, perfect for a post WW2 / beginning of the Cold War story).

& that annoying ear worm of a theme tune if there ever was one:

https://youtu.be/gAlcC4013J0?si=HBmEqy4BP-Df_O2D

Like all good movies at the end you are left to guess, does the boy get the girl? Who knows…………………….

And so as Rigsby might say it’s goodnight Vienna.