Vienna initially depressing

I remember Vienna as very beautiful. We were here at New Years Eve about 30 years ago. We arrived on Friday after a full day on the trains and caught the underground to our AirBNB. Everything was grey and rather dirty. Our accomodation is in a tiny room, very stuffy. I took the hint from a review and asked for a fan. Our host only has one, which he uses during the day, then we can have at night.

Our location is in a grand, but very shabby area, which doesn’t help. The weather has been mild, but very humid. I expect we are tired from travelling so much.

We are on our second museum today, after spending a couple of hours at one yesterday. The buildings are magnificent and today we have a mixture of sunshine and cloud, which makes me feel better.

We are catching up with an old friend of Stephen’s. She has quite good English and seems a genuine person. We had coffee with her at a nice cafe and it was easy to get her talking about herself. I don’t mean that unkindly, Stephen asked questions and she didn’t ask us questions, We may have an outing with her this evening. The story is that Stephen had a home stay visit when he was studying German as a mature aged student. The mother has died and the father is over 90 years old, hence seeing the daughter instead of them.

We have two more nights here, partly because when Stephen first contacted her she mentioned Sunday as a day when she had time. We otherwise would not have stayed here for four nights.

Our next destination is Dresden, and I have booked us into a small cottage, which we will have to ourselves. I’m rather over sharing with people, particularly when there is only one bathroom and toilet.

There are a lot of tourist here in Vienna, and you will see from the top photo that we didn’t get here early enough to avoid a long queue. Still, it moved fairly fast.

Yesterday we wanted to see the river, but found it very unattractive, with modern buildings and incredible amounts of graffiti. At first we came to the canal, and thought that the river would be better, but it wasn’t. We went to a famous church later in a more attractive part of the city, but it was very busy with tourists, of course.

We had dinner at an ‘Arabian’ cafe, and enjoyed the food. The good thing about being here inAustria is that it’s much cheaper than Switzerland. But, we miss the beauty and cleanliness and happy people. Even Stephen’s friend said she finds people here to be rude and unfriendly. She has moved to a small town out of the city.