I’ve always known that ice cream parlors in Vienna officially close sometime in September or October and re-open in March. I didn’t realize until now that it’s the Chamber of Commerce that chooses the dates. (I always thought the ice cream sellers simply agreed on that.)
I knew something was up when I was in the First District yesterday and saw lots of people, still in their winter coats, leaning in to large ice cream cones before lunch. And I have to say I love that about the Viennese. In the meantime, you can get “Saloneis” — as opposed to “Supermarkteis” — any time of the year, but there is still a noticeably large number of people who celebrate the First Day of Ice Cream, even if the weather is distinctly March-like, with quite a cutting wind.
The added attraction this year is that the ice cream artisans are among those contributing to the celebrations for the 200th anniversary of Johann Strauss’s birth. (The son, not the father, and therefore the composer of the “Blue Danube Waltz” and not, for example, the “Danube Songs”.) Apparently, there is already a Fledermaus flavor (I have to try that one!) and a “Night in Venice” flavor that was inspired by tiramisu.
My translation of the plaque at Steinhof: At the beginning of December 1981, a Vienna-wide referendum initiated by the non-partisan citizen group Steinhofgründe rejected the construction that had already been approved for this site.
In accordance with the will of the people, the Steinhof area, in its untouched state, was opened to the public as a recreational space on December 23rd, 1981.
(Nice Christmas present! ;-))
How is it that I have now lived over 36 years in Vienna and only last Sunday discovered this part of Steinhof? I have an excuse for 11 of those years as dogs are not allowed in the area. This does however leave 25 years for which I cannot account. And how did I come to discover it now?
An answer to the first question first. All that time, whenever I heard the name Steinhof I thought of the hospital complex designed by Otto Wagner and Carlo von Boog and devoted largely to the treatment of the (wealthy!) mentally ill. (In Viennese, the area was also referred to as Baumgartner Höhe and had become a kind of shorthand for the psychiatric clinic, much the way “McLean’s” is used in Boston.) I had even taken a tour of the hospital complex once. I’m sorry to say that the only thing that sticks in my mind, other than the beauty of the Jugendstil buildings, is that the church, designed by Otto Wagner, was lined with tiles to quite a height. Taller than me, as I remember, and the reason given was that patients were more or less required to attend services but could not always control their bodily functions. The tiles made it possible to hose down the building after the services.
How did I come to discover it last Sunday? I wanted to go to Wilhelminenberg in the 16th district for a walk and on the bus up from the Ottakring S-Bahn station decided to get off at the Feuerwache am Steinhof stop, rather than the Savoyenstraße one, and then walk towards Dehnepark in the 14th. I was planning to walk around the outside of the grounds, as I had often done with Maylo, and enjoy the beautiful houses out that way. When I got off the bus, though, with an astonishing number of people, I realized I didn’t have to walk around the outside. I could go in. And I’m very glad I did. It is one more beautiful place to walk more or less in the Vienna Woods and will, I think, make a really nice place for picnics when the weather is warmer.
By the way, this being Vienna, I actually ran into someone I know on my walk. (“Wien ist ein Dorf” we often say. Vienna is a village.)
Here are a few more photos.
Walking time from Feuerwache am Steinhof to Hütteldorferstraße this time around (I got a little lost) was probably about an hour and a half. Below you can see the map.
We did it! We finally finished the Rundumadum hiking trail. And only 😉 two and a half years or so after we went hiking together the last time, as described here. We managed to pick the perfect day for it, too. It was sleeting and windy and, of course, rather icy under foot with all that sleet. But, as we agreed, there is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, so we pulled on our warm and water-repellent things and went out.
As I mentioned in that post from May 2022, we didn’t manage the whole last stretch in one shot and so just had a couple of kilometers to go this time. We took the 34A bus from Floridsdorf more or less to where we stopped last time and set off from there in the direction of the Danube. Remarkably, given that we had often had trouble with the directions and missing trail signs, we didn’t have to re-trace our steps once. We found the pedestrian overpass that allowed us to cross the Autobahn first try and found ourselves walking along the banks of the Danube where the wind was, if possible, even stronger.
Other than a few hardy dog walkers, some with rather unhappy looking dogs, and a couple of joggers, we were the only ones crazy or driven enough (“We *will* finish it today”) to be out. Oddly enough, I can’t say it was unpleasant. We had enough to talk about, the scenery is always beautiful, and we were about to complete a journey I started alone in November 2018, if my memory serves me correctly. (Here is that first Rundumadum post with some photos of the stretch in friendlier weather.)
We found the Jedlerseer Brücke (bridge) easily and crossed to the Donauinsel, I remembering the first time I did that, with Maylo, who had to be carried part of the way. (He never did get used to bridges.) Then we transversed the Donauinsel, waved to Nussdorf, where we were headed, on the other side of the Danube, and followed the trail southeast to the next bridge and crossed. We came out quite close to the Heiligenstadt U4 station, and it was a little tempting to just stop there. However, we walked out to Heiligenstädter Straße and walked northwest to Nussdorf, the official end of that trail section. We were rewarded with a combination of some of the most famous “Gemeindebauten” or public housing blocks, including the Karl-Marx-Hof, and some beautiful 19th-century privately owned apartment buildings.
In Nussdorf, we congratulated each other and went back to my hiking partner’s place for some much needed Glühwein and Christmas cookies.
Up next — the city’s 14 “city hiking trails” (“Stadwanderwege”), which include some as short as 4 km and one as long as almost 23 km. (I suspect we won’t be walking that long one in one go!) Most of them seem to be between 10 and 12 km.
Below are a few photos from today’s walk, mainly to show the sleety, foggy weather. The last one also shows that we did make it all the way to Nussdorf.
Trail number 24
Distance: 7.8 km (of which we did three or four today)
No turtle doves, but Vienna is showing itself from its best side. Weeks of grayness are very common in November, December, and January, so we rejoice over every hour of sunshine. At the same time, today, the temperatures are hovering around freezing, making it feel like Christmas. And, of course, who could do without the walk in the Vienna Woods (in the picture, you see the Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark in the 18th district) after the celebrations yesterday — and, in my case, this evening again?
Actually, I already took quite a hike last weekend (Sophienalpe) but didn’t have time to upload photos so you are getting a couple of photos from yesterday’s hike on Wilhelminenberg. As I am fond of saying, “And it’s all within the city limits!” (A friend of mine from London, having heard this multiple times over a couple of hikes, commented, “That seems to be quite important to you.” Yes, it is!)
The big difference between last week’s hike and this was that yesterday, suddenly, the woods smelled autumnal. They had that special sent of fallen and just-starting-to-rot leaves as well as mushrooms.
Whatever time of year, it is all very beautiful, even when the sun isn’t shining.
One of my kindest and most faithful readers asked if I had survived the invasion of Swifties. This made me think I should share these posts from the Wiener Alltagspoeten (Vienna’s Everyday Poets).
Wiener Alltagspoeten is a movement, one could almost say, started and run by Andreas Rainer. It comprises a website, Facebook page, and a couple of books. It’s a collection of “seen and heards” from the streets of Vienna.
The two excerpts below come from the Facebook page. In the first one, an older gentleman is saying he doesn’t know who this “Tannor Swift” is, but he finds it utterly ridiculous that some total idiot wants to ruin the day for 200,000 peaceful people. The only thing is that it’s pretty much completely in Viennese dialect (e.g. Vollwappler, versaut, and depatt), which makes it especially memorable.
The second one tells the tale of, again, an older gentleman, this one in the upmarket district, Döbling. He is usually observed driving through his neighborhood playing classical music full volume on his car stereo. After the concert was canceled, he was heard playing Taylor Swift. 😊
I just heard from a colleague who is currently in Vienna with a group of U.S. American students that two of his group were walking around yesterday and ended up chatting with the Austrian president, Alexander van der Bellen. They even got a selfie with him! (With or without his shelter dog I don’t know. )
The last two mornings I got the faintest whiff and thought I was imagining it because it is very early. This morning, it was clear — the linden trees are flowering again and the air is full of the sweet tantalizing scent.
Since I like to check my perceptions, I decided to go back and see if it really is so early or whether I was making that up. Here are the dates of my previous posts about the linden trees:
The Vienna City Marathon (VCM) 2024 has come and gone this sunny and cool day, good for running although perhaps a tad too windy. It seemed a bit uneventful this year.
No course records were broken as two were in 2023, when Samwel Mailu of Kenya very clearly broke the men’s course record and Julia Mayer, in a stunning display of tenacity and speed in the homestretch, broke the Austrian women’s course record by one second.
No pacemakers finished the race without their racers as Timon Theuer’s did in 2022, when Theuer fell at the 32-km mark and bowed out of the race. This year, Theuer was entered for the half marathon.
There were no neck-and-neck finishes, as there were in 2022 when Joyce Chepkirui, defending her title from the year before, just managed to maintain her lead and cross the finish line before Ruth Chebitok.
No one collapsed near the finish line and therefore none of the other runners had to dodge an ambulance on their way to the end of the race as Chepkirui had to when she won on 2021.
None of the winners was disqualified for wearing the wrong shoes, as happened to Derera Hurisa of Ethiopia, heartbreakingly, also in 2021.
So, beautiful weather and clear wins by the leaders: Chala Regasa (ETH), Bernard Muia (KEN), Albert Kangogo (KEN), Mario Bauernfeind (AUT), Nazret Weldu (ERI), Faith Chepkoech (KEN), Rebbeca Tanui (KEN), and Julia Mayer (AUT).
In fact, coming into the homestretch Chala Regusa was so far ahead of the other men the VCM Twitter feed (I refuse to call it “X” and, in fact, only look at it to stay on top of what is happening in the marathon) had a post: Umdrehen muss er sich nicht, der erste Verfolger ist mehr als zwei Minuten hinter ihm. (He doesn’t have look over his shoulder – the nearest competitor is over two minutes behind him.)
In terms of diversity, just two interesting points from the interviews after the race. When Mario Bauernfeind, first Austrian man and on the police force in Vienna, was asked where he would go from here, he said he would have to go home, talk to the people close to him, and figure it out, that his children were getting older and needed more of his time. And Julia Mayer, first Austrian woman, mentioned that she had her period and so was really proud of her body for doing such a good job. To his credit, the ORF interviewer didn’t blink and later said something about how good that she felt free to mention that openly.
Once again, the Kenyan fans were out in force and showed great joy even though the first places were occupied by an Ethiopian (first time for the men since 2015) and an Eritrean (first time for the women ever, if I understood correctly).
ecbinvienna 