An ideal weekend: Vienna

I'll have a video up in this space in the next few days with some thoughts on Vienna - not much new, but I finally did start to get a sense of the cultural life that isn't built around "Alt Wien" (Old Vienna), the nostalgic/imperial and somewhat stuffy/distant stuff of the city center.

But first, I wanted to mark a delightful weekend that was built very closely around that kind of culture - and one that, thanks to generations of expectations of affordable art and state subsidies, worked out to be eminently affordable on a grad school budget. After the jump: a jam packed weekend o' Vienna!

I mean yeah it's a bit stuffy and pricey but I am pointedly not saying that Alt Wien isn't stunning. It's, uh, pretty stunning!

Saturday morning I woke up quite early, as I've been clocking in to sunrise lately. I like this a lot, though it's usually robbing me of sleep since sunrise here comes around 5 AM. (Midsummer and very far east in the one time zone all of continental Europe shares...) Figuring that once I was up I was up, I decided to head to the Flohmarket (flea market) at the Naschmarkt, the city's major market street.

I could probably learn to play these instruments and also transport them around Europe for another two months, right? RIGHT?

I didn't pick anything up - having one backpack for a summer-long trip is a great incentive against excessive souveniring, and in any case I tend to only pick up things that I actually need back home these days - an odd article of clothing, a few dishes here and there. But I love flea markets if only to see what people scrape together for them and/or what they figure will sell. It's a place where tourist kitsch (so many porcelain statues of Alpine cherubs) meets Austrian practicality (tons of dishes and cheap clothes). Getting there early meant being there with the deal-shark locals, so it was fun to watch haggling and the greetings between vendors who knew each other as they set up.

I moved on to the food section of the Naschmarkt; this early, the prepared food stalls were still setting up, and the dried fruits/nuts/spice shops were doing the same. (Pro tip: show up this early and you'll see who's literally dusting off their wares, maybe a sign that they don't turn over as much as you'd want them to.) I picked up a family farm's cherries, another farm's lettuce and radishes, and a quick breakfast of homemade biscotti, then headed home and dropped off my spoils. Up next: a street market I'd seen advertised a few days earlier in a neighborhood that I dug, and one that crucially (and possibly insanely) was offering street haircuts.

WHO WOULD NOT TAKE UP THIS OFFER?

My thinking was, it's always a bit of a crap shoot getting a haircut while in a strange city, and this way I'd at least have a great story if it went south. Joke's on me, nerds, as this turned out to be one of the better haircuts of my life, sidestepping the usual traps of my cowlicky, overly-fine, poofy hair. Street haircuts: I very confusingly recommend them!

After this, I hustled across town to the Musikverein, where the Vienna Philharmonic was performing one of their final programs of the season (Mahler 8, a Strauss piece and the Firebird Suite). I'd picked up a standing room ticket on Monday for €5, and lined up outside the concert hall with an increasingly large crowd of fellow standees. The doors opened an hour before the performance, and we filed in to a second line at the base of stairs up to the concert hall; at half-hour they let us in to the doors of the space, and at ten minutes til, the doors themselves opened. There was a mad rush for the railing - the standing gallery is pretty unforgiving if you're not at the railing or at the very back - and I managed to land near the middle for a beautiful performance. The symphony's sound is clean, very well-blended, not too aggressive but rich and full. For less than $6, a steal.

This concert hall is nice enough I guess

I doubled back home to wolf down a late lunch and lie down, tuckered out from the early morning start. After a breather and a few "keeping in touch with the people I love" odds and ends, I bounced back out the door and headed to the Museumsquartier, a huge cultural complex near the Innerstadt, where legendary theatre director Peter Brook's newest production, Battlefield, was playing at the Festwochen, a monthlong festival of theatre, performance, and installation art. The show was beautiful, though perhaps better-calibrated for a smaller space and a more attentive audience. (Though in fairness to the smoking-happy Viennese, there's a decent chance that the choral coughing throughout this very short play was more about emphysema than lack of investment.) I'm glad to have seen one of Brook's pieces in person, and it had a couple of moments that were truly transporting, pulling off that magic trick of suspending time and uniting its audience, even if on the whole I wish I had seen it under different conditions.

Also great to be at a cultural event with buzz - it didn't pull off the "am I in Chicago?" energetic trick that the Volksbühne in Berlin did, but it was a great energy.

After passing out at home post-show, I rose Sunday morning and headed to church. In this case, the Augustiner Kirche, one of the imperial churches in the city center. Foregoing the Vienna Children's Choir mayhem at... I forget the other church's name, I went here instead as they build their weekly mass out of the performance of a classical mass, in this case a Schubert composition. The space was gorgeous and the choir and orchestra quite stunning. It's a full mass, so if (like me) you're a mostly-stupid protestant, you'll have a lot of "oh we're kneeling, oh you all know what to sing here, oh I'm the dummy" moments, but if your life isn't a constant series of moments in which you realize you don't know what's going on, how is that possible who are you and do you ever leave the house

It's possible that the Habsburgs had some money to throw around, though it's hard to say for sure.

After church I headed for the hills - specifically to a heuriger, one of the wine gardens that fill the hills around the city. I wrote about this last summer, but these are a real treat, and I'm told even more so in the fall as the new harvest comes in. You get cheap wine from the vineyard, you pick out food from a buffet (a menu at the higher-end places that don't seem nearly as fun) and settle in at picnic benches among the grapes, though some heuriger are less "AH NATURE" than others. This was a pretty swell lunch, and a nice break from the city.

I don't know what ended in 1979, but it started less than 40 years after Columbus "discovered" America, so uhhh good job whatever you were! Now you're a vineyard, which seems plenty nice! You should be proud of yourself.

Hauling back into the city, I headed to the Staatsoper, the gorgeous opera house, where they were performing Pelléas et Mélisande. Having done the standing-room thing (a great deal at €3-4) in the past, and having spent so much of the previous day on my feet, though, I felt like taking a seat, and so decided to take in the opera al fresco, on the piazza to the side of the opera house, where select performances are streamed for free. Now: sonically, this is not ideal, and atmospherically you're balancing the fun of the experience against the distractions of an active city center, but as a one-time shot at a new way to see opera, I thoroughly recommend it. (If you're visiting Vienna for the first time, though, do standing room, I promise it's worth it.)

To get a seat for the outdoor livestream, you gotta show up early, and hang out in a chair reading a book and relaxing. Ugh! Who could possibly enjoy something like that.

So! That's a weekend, and a monstrously full one at that. What's more, of all those performances - four total - the total tally came to €13, with the most expensive ticket I bought all week being a €10 ticket to Wonder Woman at the Haydn Kino, which also included a free beer to celebrate opening night.

Vienna: sometimes you are a little grand for your britches but holy moly you come by it honestly.

Up next: video, some parting thoughts, and (later) (probably) a useful post for people who are looking to make their own visit!