More Restaurant Recommendations and Reunions

Trip Start Nov 02, 2006

Trip End Dec 19, 2007

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Flag of Austria Vienna, Austria
Monday, June 18, 2007

I spent the weekend in Vienna, mostly to meet up with some SF friends that were also in town. I had never been to Vienna - only Salzburg. Vienna is also a beautiful, European city that seems very livable. Interestingly, the center of the city is not on the Danube, but a bit to the Southwest.
As with many European cities, the center highlight is a large church, in this case St. Stephen's. The cathedral is Gothic except part of the roof, which is made of colorful tiles. I don't know the whole story, but the cathedral suffered major damage during WWII and I suppose when it was fixed in the 50s or 60s, they decided not to do it in the Gothic style.

I stayed near the Opera House, but did not see an opera or the Philharmonic this time. The weather was too beautiful to spend it inside - completely sunny, blue skies and really warm, but not too humid

01 - Weiner Schnitzel

. My favorite part of the city was to the NW of the Opera House, where the Museum Quarter, Royal Palace and other old buildings and statues are located. On Friday evening I walked though the entire area from St. Stephen's and it had that very majestic feel. The only problem are the horse carriages waiting to take tourists around - the smell is quite foul!

Friday night I met up with my friend Creighton, who has been living in Shanghai and Seoul for over a year, but who I know from SF. We met some of his friends from NY and had dinner outside in the Museum Quarter, which was filled with people eating, drinking & lazing about on these outdoor concrete bed-type seats.

On Saturday, Creighton and I had lunch at Figlmuller, which is world famous for their Wiener Schnitzel. I like Wiener Schnitzel, but this place is ridiculous! It serves the largest, thinnest, least soggy/oily, most tender piece of Wiener Schnitzel I have ever had (the next day I had some Wiener Schnitzel at a normal place & it was good, but did not even come close). Everyone in the entire restaurant eats Wiener Schnitzel - you have to wonder why they bother having other things on the menu.

From there, we walked to the Danube Canal, which is at the edge of the center city. There are a number of bars along the canal, including a beach bar, complete with sand and lounge chairs and a bar with a swimming pool. Its a bit of an odd sight to see, since the canal was not particularly beautiful. We kept walking across the canal to what seemed more like a suburb. There we stumbled across an outdoor neighborhood concert & ended up staying for a few hours

02 - Beach Bar

. The music was good, but the larger entertainment was the people watching. Since moving to Stockholm, I have not seen much diversity, but this was the most diverse and interesting group of people I've seen in Europe. Everyone seemed to know everyone else and was happily drinking beers, chatting and just hanging out all afternoon in the sun (on the corner of a street, next to a church). The music acts we stayed for included a gypsy-sounding band with the happiest, most enthusiastic singer/pianist/dancer/air flutist (there was an actual flutist) I've ever seen, another gypsy-sounding band with a good trumpet player and a Germany country music singer. The crowd included an older gentleman we named Einstein - almost everyone stopped to pay their respects to him & later in the day he took his camera and snapped shots of everyone and everything. There was also a German cowboy and his wife (presumably), who was sort of dressed like you might expect on Little House on the Prairie. There were lots of hippies (but no pot in the air), some Indians in traditional dress, a few Muslims, more blacks than I've seen since moving to Europe, tons of kids, young people, old people, and an unusual number of Caucasian women with young black children. It was so refreshing compared to the racial tensions that I feel are affecting many other parts of Europe.

Anyhow, back to the restaurant recommendations

03 - Church Fundraiser

. For dinner, our hotel recommended Zum Finsteren Stern (Schulhof 8). We met up with another SF friend, Chris & his fiance, Heather - they are living in Paris for the year - and another 2 people from NY, including a woman who I went to college with. The dinner was amazing and such a good deal! They have outdoor seating in this little square. The staff is so friendly and accommodating. We had the fixed price menu, which was 6 menu items for only 46 Euro. We also had 5 or 6 bottles of wine, at least as many bottles of water and coffee/tea after dessert (strawberry rhubarb sorbet) and it was about $100 each. Not only can you not have a dinner like that in Stockholm, but you can't in NY or SF either. We had such a fun time - I think we finally left around midnight & headed to Passage, a club near the Museum Quarter that is housed in an old subway station (you feel as if you're going to the subway when you enter). The DJ there kept yelling, "Italian Style!!!" in a German accent - I don't know why.

All in all, one of the best weekends I've had in Europe. Vienna is beautiful and picturesque and the people are really nice.