Vienna
9/03/2025 - 9/15/2025
We had a very easy and completely uneventful 2.5 hour bus trip from Graz to Vienna. Just the way we like it! Vienna is the capitol of Austria and the only large city in the country with a population of 2 million. For perspective, Graz (where we just came from) is the second largest in the country with a population of only 300,000. Big difference! Vienna is divided into 23 districts. We are in the 13th, so pretty far from the center. But it’s an exchange and Vienna is kind of expensive. So we we’re happy to have free lodging even if it means having to take the tram to get to inner city. But it is admittedly a bit of a hassle!
Our arrival day started like most of our arrival days. We found our apartment, got settled and headed out to walk around and find food and wine. We found 2 Heurigers within walking distance from the apartment. A Heuriger is a traditional Viennese wine tavern. They were originally family farm houses, therefore, they are rustic, often family-run establishments on the outskirts of Vienna near vineyards. Fun fact: Vienna has more vineyards growing within its city limits than any other city - about 1700 acres!
The next day we did a walking tour. Vienna is an incredibly pretty city! It has been ranked as the most livable city in the world for the last several years. It has beautiful architecture, is safe, clean, and has a very low homeless population. They have excellent social safety nets and an emphasis on affordable housing. The city is continuously building apartments and housing that is integrated throughout the city (there are even units in the Hapsburg Palace!). So no slummy low-income designated areas.
Up to 80% of citizens meet the income limits (so you don’t have to be destitute to qualify). And once you have an apartment, your contract is for life. People are rarely if ever evicted for failure to pay. The program has been in existence since the early 1900’s and is focused on ensuring that all citizens have access to affordable, safe, dignified housing. The reason they don’t evict is simple, they have figured out that keeping people housed saves the system a lot of money! Very little homelessness, very low crime rates, and very low incarceration rates. It costs a whole heck of a lot more to run prisons, police departments, and homeless programs than provide decent apartments. It’s so simple! Just make sure everyone has the opportunity to have a roof over their head and decent healthcare and so many other issues simply resolve themselves!! I’ll get off my soapbox now and get back to travel fun!
During the tour, we saw many monuments, but the one that stood out was a Jewish Memorial. It really kind of just looks like a concrete cube (until you are told what it is and the meaning). It is an “inaccessible library” with its books turned backward, spines facing inward. By turning the book spines inward, the memorial represents the immense loss of Jewish culture, knowledge, and life that was silenced by the Nazis. The blank, unreadable pages symbolize the unlived lives and untold stories of the over 65,000 Austrian Jews who were murdered.
The memorial has no doors or entrance handles, making the library inaccessible. This signifies the loss that was created by the genocide and can never be entered. The names of concentration camps where Austrian Jews were murdered are inscribed around the base of the monument, along with a dedication in German, English, and Hebrew.
Vienna has a huge market with lots of vendors and restaurants (Naschmarkt) that seemed like a “must do”. We visited for lunch and found the food to be ridiculously expensive and some of the vendors pretty pushy/rude. The vibe is really cool though and it is still worth checking out. We actually were walking through another day and spotted a nice little wine bar/stand, so decided to stop in for a glass and the staff there was extremely nice. So… there you have it – different day, totally different experience.
On our third full day (Saturday 9/6), Grady had found us a cool food tour. It wasn’t like a typical tourist food tour; it was more designed for locals. They offer it once a month in different locations throughout the city and it is self-guided. Basically, we booked it online and showed up the next day to pay and get the details. They gave us the official yellow wrist band (not to be mistaken for Colleen’s “fall risk” wrist band!) and a map with the list of participants in the event. They provided a recommended route, but you could do them in any order. There were nine small, family-owned, out of the way businesses to visit and a decent amount of walking, which we loved. You “toured” 3 different districts. Each business had some kind of snack or little “buffet” set up (and we could purchase wine separately at most of the stops).
The variety was fantastic – shop #1 sold oils, spice mixes, and liqueurs (they had a whole little buffet set up in a back room with drinks and salad and breads with spreads and oils), stop #2 was a Croation wine shop and deli, then we visited a super cute little tea room (they gave us the yummiest scones with cream and jam!), next was a “healthy street food” restaurant (our least favorite stop because the staff were kind of assholes), stop #5 was some kind of small grocery store that also served some food and wine (like a tiny Austrian Whole Foods!), then came an ice cream shop (we were served two seriously delicious desserts each with pastries, ice cream and different sauces), next up was a taco restaurant (2 tacos each of our choice!), stop #8 was a Portuguese restaurant (of course we loved that one!), and the final stop sold cook books and all kinds of spice mixes that are made in house. They had a whole buffet set up with little snacks and breads and frittatas all made using their different spice mixes – complete with the recipes (in German!).
It was such a great adventure. I’m not sure how Grady finds these random events, but it seems to be his superpower!
After the food tour, we hit a festival that was being held in hero square. Hero Square is a public square in front of the Hofburg Palace, named for two statues of Austrian military heroes. The square is a site of historical events, most famously known as the location where Adolf Hitler announced Austria's annexation into Nazi Germany in 1938.
Another day as we were walking around exploring random parts of the city we happened upon a horse… playing a concertina! Why a horse you ask… The Spanish Riding School in Vienna dates back to 1565 when Emperor Maximilian II established a wooden riding arena for his imported Spanish horses. So they are kind of a big deal here. But more on them later. We actually got tickets to see a show toward the end of our stay. But in the mean time, we had to get a picture of the concertina playing street horse for mom!
At the center of the city is St Stephens Cathedral which was established in the 12th century. It is both Gothic and Romanesque style and has a beautiful green and white and yellow tile roof. We saw part of the inside and hauled our ever-expanding butts up the 343 steps to the top of the tower to see the views. That is a lot of steps!
We spent a day visiting the Schonbrunn Palace and Vienna Zoo (which is on the palace grounds). They are extremely close to where we are staying, so for once we didn’t have a long morning commute!
The Schönbrunn Palace is the former summer residence of the Habsburg emperors from the 18th centure until the end of their reign in 1918. The palace was enormous (1441 rooms) and gorgeous.
Franz Joseph reigned as emperor of the Austria for 68 years (1848-1916) and later also King of Hungary. He was born (1830) in the Schonbrunn Palace and died here. He was humble and slept in a basic bedroom in a basic iron bed. He woke daily at 4am to pray and wash, then worked all day long until late at night. He was dedicated to his people and position. He was married to his cousin Elizabeth of Bavaria (aka “Sissi”). Franz Joseph adored her.
She wasn’t that into being married and traveled a lot on her own to get away from the stifling rules of the palace and especially from her pain in the ass mother-in-law. She was considered the most beautiful empress of all time with gorgeous ankle length hair. She was obsessed with weight and had a strict diet (starvation) and exercise regimen. If you read more about her, she was clearly anorexic! The “Empress” on Netflix, is about her. We just started watching it… it’s pretty good in spite of some of the inaccuracies we have already spotted!
The size of the grounds is even more impressive than the size of the palace at approximately 435 acres. It is supposedly designed to rival those of Versailles… they don’t even come close!! The middle section is pretty, but it is definitely no Versailles! And the sides are pathetic. More like gravel roads through the woods with a few fountains (a couple were pretty impressive, but some were terrible). There is an amazing viewing terrace at the far back of the palace grounds that is pretty awesome called Gloriette hill. It is a bit of an uphill walk to get to it, but totally worth the views. At the top of the hill is an 18th-century neo-classical monument that was built as a symbol of Habsburg power.
The grounds also contain the Schönbrunn Zoo (Tiergarten Schönbrunn), which is the oldest continuously operating zoo in the world and a UNESCO sight. It was a very pretty zoo and they had some animals we can’t see in our zoo in NC (koalas, penguins, and a panda), but our zoo has this zoo beat hands down for big/proper habitats for the animals!
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