Viennese whirls

This was it. My first trip abroad since July. My first trip abroad without my family since March. My first trip abroad with this particular friend EVER. As you can see, it was a momentous occasion.

So, quite why I was sitting in the Wetherspoons at Gatwick South Terminal drinking Strongbow at 11am on a Friday morning is unclear. My friend was eating a cheeseburger smuggled in from the McDonald’s next door.   She is amazing.

For a variety of reasons, October has been a bit rubbish for both of us. Hers for actually valid reasons, and mine because I’m in a funk. I’m not going to lay all the blame on the Autumn equinox, but it certainly didn’t help.  So it was with a huge sigh of relief that we boarded the plane, passed out, and woke up in Vienna.
Having made our way into the city, the first thing we saw was a roadsign to Budapest and the second was some graffiti that said ‘tourist are terrorist’.  Whilst this would have been much more intimidating had the grammar been correct, we did noticeably pick up the pace after that and found our hotel pretty sharpish. It turned out I had inadvertently booked a mini suite, with a redundant little seating area wedged between the bathroom and bedroom. I say redundant, it did come in handy when I woke up the next morning at 7am and needed somewhere to go and hang out so I wouldn’t disturb my friend. You could also do yoga in it, probably. I didn't try. The major plus point of this hotel was that they put cava out at breakfast and appeared to operate a no judgement policy.

Anyway, Friday evening.  A quick face wash, some more eyeliner and we were good to go for the evening.  We walked through the centre in the early evening light and found a little beer house (pub seems so unromantic) that served lard on bread and small glasses of beer from about 40 taps around the bar. We opted out of the lard and into the beer, which was lovely.  We then made our way to a ‘traditional Austrian Gasthaus serving classic Viennese dishes in a charming atmosphere’. I quote from the guidebook. All I can say is, someone took a hefty backhand of cash for that review. My goodness. Arriving in an empty room blazing with light, the waiter greeted us with all the enthusiasm of an interrogator.  (I mean nothing by that beyond this causal observation. I am casting no aspersions re. history). 2 extremely small glasses of wine later (warning: they serve wine in 0.8cl measures. That’s almost literally a shot), we decided to have a go at the menu. Apologetically, and bear in mind I am a) fluent in at least 2.5 languages and b) naturally very polite, we signalled that German wasn’t a strong point and we might need some help with ordering. The man rolled his eyes and bought out a pile of flashcards. You may remember these from when you were being taught to read in kindergarten. These had a German word and an English word on each. For example: ‘schnitzel’ and ‘pointlessly thin, greasy, breaded piece of meat’. Unfortunately, not many of the German words were even on the menu. We eventually opted to share a house special, which we thought was schnitzel and in fact turned out to be goulash. After some desultory conversation in which the waiter seemed to warm up a bit (probably excited about how much spit we’d just eaten) we escaped into the night, found a busy bar, met some new friends and drank a lot of vodka.

On Saturday, we did a lot of sightseeing and walking, which was nice and almost all entirely purposeful, given that we ended up at an Irish pub. That evening, we struck gold. Ignoring all alarm bells about going into an Austrian cellar (sorry) we crossed the threshold of the oldest wine hall (or Heuriger) in Vienna and descended in an intrepid manner. It was full of locals, smoking and drinking. Result. We ordered a bottle of red and a starter of liptauer to share. We only ordered one because the descriptions of it, when I googled traditional Austrian cooking, were alarming and it appeared to be bright orange. It was bright orange, but it was a delicious spicy cream cheese dip thing that was very nice with some dark rye bread. For our main course, both of us picked the house speciality: pork knuckle with dumplings and sauerkraut. Two huge knuckles (how big were the pigs, one wonders idly) duly arrived, together with two dumplings the size of my fist (or, actually, my friend’s fist, and she has quite big hands) and a heap of cabbage. It was incredible. In terms of ‘things that intrinsically don’t have a lot of flavour’, dumplings have got to be pretty high on the list, but they were the perfect carrier for the eye wateringly sharp sauerkraut and the fatty meat. Which was clever, because normally I don’t like eating mouthfuls of vinegar. (Un)comfortably full, it was all we could do to stagger home via a nightcap of a 10 euro glass of port and fall asleep.

By Sunday, the consistent eating and drinking had taken their toll somewhat. We were liverish and could barely force down the breakfast cava. We did however, make use of their ham and cheese selection to avail ourselves of some free sandwiches, which came in very handy when we arrived at Vienna airport, found our second wind (and a pub) and drank quite a lot of wine before our plane home.

All in all, an excellent weekend.

Massive dumpling alert: far left