Vienna notes

I didn’t have a very cultural time, since I had a nasty ear infection that made walking exhausting and music pointless. But I managed one good photograph, and saw enough of the city to remind myself how very much I love it. There is something about the light which is wonderful; there is the astonishing wealth of art. I know I should appreciate the music, but I never had any interest in classical music when I was there as a young man, and nowadays I am allergic to the Mozart industry.

What struck me on this visit was how very little Americanised the place is. This may sound absurd, but inside the Gürtel there is very little sign of the kind of car-borne and spreadsheet-driven commerce that spreads over most of Europe. Almost everyone smokes. Public transport works, of course; the shops are almost all small. There are greengrocers’; little bookshops that aren’t in the least bit twee; somewhere I passed a tailor who does alterations. I suspect that bits of Greenwich Village must have been like this once. Everywhere there are bars and unpretentious cafes. To enter them is to realise just how loathsome and homogenised British pub culture has become. We had only one disgusting meal in four days, and that was the result of ducking into the first open pizzeria in a rainstorm on Good Friday evening. One question does arise, though: has any reader tried Bueschel? It appears to be a Styrian dish made of pig’s lung. My courage failed me.

Two bad shocks at the Albertina. The first was the discovery that the collection has been removed to make for an exhibition about Mozart; the second, that the cafe, though it still sells delicious food, charges €6.40 for a small bottle of mineral water. This makes a snack for four people without wine rather expensive.

If you are going to spend a lot of money on a meal, the place to do so is the Witwe Bolte, in Spittelberg. Not only is the food magnificent, but the notes in the list of wines by the glass are accurate. It’s not fantastically expensive, either.

The cafe in the Hotel Sacher which sells original sachertorte ought to be a horrible overpriced tourist trap — and it is certainly nothing like a proper cafe, either ancient or modern. But the torte itself is utterly sublime, and I speak as someone who doesn’t like chocolate or cake.

I wish my German were good enough to read Nietzsche. I flicked through one of those lovely yellow paperbacks of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in a bookshop, but decided that it was just too pretentious to buy it. This was probably a mistake. But you have to admire a city, indeed a culture, where works of philosophy are published in durable, pocket-sized paperbacks for €7.00 or so.