ecbinvienna

I *thought* everything was late this year. Last year I posted a photo of these trees with more gold and fewer leaves on October 12th!

It was amazing how many people were out and about at seven o’clock this morning. The last few weeks my morning walks with Mylo were fairly solitary, and dark, and chilly, for that matter. Yesterday we set the clocks back, and suddenly everyone has come alive again. The Viennese, especially the ones in my generation, tend to be pretty early risers. Now they are back in form.

I can really tell, where I live, that the semester started today (always much later here than in the USA). Suddenly there aren’t any seats free on the tram, the supermarket is packed at lunch time, and the free newspaper is gone before I get to the tram stop. I still remember my first two months in Vienna, August and September 1988. I thought I had found the perfect city–a spectacular selection of concerts and museums and no need to make one’s way through masses of people. That illusion ended at the beginning of October, when the universities started up again. 😉

It is perfect early fall weather here so Maylo and I expected crowds on Nussberg today. What we hadn’t reckoned on was that today is the annual Weinwandertag, when all the usual Heurigen are open and are supplemented by additional stands along the way. It must be pretty much a record turn out.

Seeing this Maylo and I took the low road and enjoyed a perfect walk for introverts. 😉

A number of years ago now the City of Vienna changed the pattern of tram traffic on the Ringstraße. I’m afraid it is my belief, and not only mine, that they only did this to make money (granted, off the tourists, which may make the change more palatable to residents), uncaring of the inconvenience to anyone taking the Ring trams regularly.

That is, in the good old days, there were two lines that went in circles around the first district. You only had to know that the one on the inner ring, the Nr. 1 tram, went clockwise and the one across the Ring on the outer circuit, the Nr. 2 tram,  went counter-clockwise. In those days you could get anywhere on the Ring quickly and without changing. And if you were a tourist you could get an overview of this incredibly important thoroughfare for the price of a normal ticket.

Inconvenience Nr. 1: It took me, a regular passenger around the Ring, at least five years to get used to the new patterns. At first I kept ending up in the 4th district when I was trying–late, as usual–to get to the Konzerthaus. In fact, last week I was at Schwedenplatz and a little old lady confided in me that she has lived in Vienna for 90 years and has never adjusted to the change. She wanted to know if the tram she was boarding would take her to the Opera. It would, but just barely, being the one that now trundles off into the 4th.

Inconvenience Nr. 2: There are now a number of places I can only reach by changing twice, where before I only had to change once. (Tip to public transportation authorities: Passengers love this.)

Inconvenience Nr. 3: Where before I had two possibilities for getting to the Konzerthaus, for example, I afterwards only had one (until the 71 was extended to the old Stock Exchange). (Next tip to the public transportation authorities: Passengers love this even more.)

All of this was done, ostensibly, in the name of making life easier for passengers. Hard to believe. I am actually one of the lucky ones. At least for me one trip I take regularly (two or three times a year to visit a friend in the 2nd district) has become easier through the changes.

Why did I mention money at the beginning? Because below is a photo of the travesty now called the “Ring Tram”–a special tram that goes all the way around the Ring, for which you need to buy a special ticket that costs about three times as much as a normal ticket. 😦 Not a good move.

I was walking through the park in front of the Nationalbank on Sunday on my way to afternoon tea at a friend’s house and took this picture. Yes, those are lilacs and, yes, it is September. That is not normal for Vienna!

In taking out my Fodor’s to check the information about the bomb damage in the State Opera, I re-discovered an excellent article at the back on Austria’s wines, written by an Englishman named Nicholas Allen, whose day job it is / was to tour Austria with an English-language theater group.

No doubt the entry will need some updating, as 1987 was pretty soon after the international “Weinskandal” (yes, that means exactly what you think it means), but the 1987 article still gives a very good overview of the various regions and varieties, including a mini-glossary of wine terms.
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The Austrian wine scandal: When it was discovered that some (although only very few) Austrian winemakers were adding anti-freeze (as I heard it) to their wines to, I’m sorry to say, improve the flavor.

Austrian wines have come a very long way since then!