Leaving the hotel in the morning for the train station, I was greeted by some of my favorite weather: clear, sunny, and about 40 degrees. That fall cold is great (though it's more of a wintertime thing in California). Put me in a great mood to catch a train to Vienna.
I expected to spend the train ride either writing blog posts or reading the books on my iPad (1Q84, Anathem, and Ready Player One), but the folks with whom I shared my compartment pretty much prevented that from happening. I was riding with three elderly sisters from America and a college student from Vienna who was studying philosophy and political science in Istanbul while living and hoping to teach theater in Prague. Fun crowd to talk to, and certainly made the hours fly by, but I didn't get any writing done!
I got off one stop earlier than planned, at Wien Simmering instead of Wien Meidling, at the advice of the student, who had told me it made for an easier U-bahn trip to my apartment. She was right. It also led to my first (and sadly, only) instance of my favorite European lunch: I picked up a döner kebab sandwich outside my subway stop for under 2 euro.
After a few minutes' walk, I arrived at the AirBnB apartment in Landstrasse I was renting. Easy enough check in, and a very cool twist: the Internet access was provided by a mobile 3G hotspot that I could take with me around town! Awesome idea that fell over in practice. I don't know if the hotspot was bad, the service was bad, or some previous renter had used up all of the data allocation, but it ended up being almost uselessly slow. It was easier to try to steal WiFi from nearby cafes...
Of course at this point I didn't realize any of this. Armed with the hotspot, my phone, and a Vienna Lonely Planet Encounter tour book from the apartment, I headed out for a bit of late afternoon sightseeing. Along the way into the Innere Stadt (the inner ring, city center, and main tourist district of Vienna), I passed by a fountain and plaza dedicated to the Russian soldiers who liberated Vienna from the Nazis. It's rare to see a monument to the Soviets in the West -- seeing it reminds one that although it was politically aligned with the West in the Cold War, geographically Vienna is much closer to its neighbors who were behind the Iron Curtain. I also passed by the Opera House, but more on both of those later.
The main destination today was the MuseumsQuartier, a large walled city-within-a-city containing a bunch of museums (duh) and other galleries, restaurants, and quirky concrete benches that get painted different bright colors. The girl on the train had told me this was the place for young people to hang out in Vienna; sure enough there were a few groups, but it was probably too early. It was also too late to make it worthwhile to museum hop, so I contented myself with a picture of Mumok, the Vienna contemporary art museum housed in an awesome modern charcoal building:
After the long day of travel, it was high time for dinner. The Lonely Planet suggested a restaurant that sounded really fun: Schon Schön had only one large table, a convivial atmosphere, and a multi course tasting menu of small dishes. Since the LP was a few years old, I checked Yelp using the hotspot real quick, but the only Schon Schön it pulled up was a hairdresser. Fine, I guess Yelp isn't that great in Vienna.
Fifteen minutes later, I learned from a rather confused man that, no, Schon Schön does not do dinner any more, and they do do hair. Drat - I didn't need a haircut. My faith in Yelp restored, I looked up a nearby restaurant to satisfy my craving for spicy food. (The European palate skews a bit bland for me.) Sure enough, the Yak and Yeti served up Nepalese food just ten minutes away, and had over four stars.
They deserved every bit of the rating. I'd never had Nepalese food before; it's very similar to Indian, with some Chinese influences as well. So good! Go here if you're ever in Vienna -- delicious, reasonably priced, super friendly, English-speaking, and where else do you get to sip your tea while sitting on a mat in this town?
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