Oh Vienna

In Septem­ber I returned to Vienna to teach anoth­er English in Action programme. I’ve got photos of galler­ies and exhib­i­tions I need to sort out still. Here’s some odds and ends of photos of other stuff.

The company put me up in a hotel until the week­end, then I stayed with my friend Delal, an art student. Unfor­tu­nately I’d managed to catch the flu halfway through the week from the kids, so I pretty much spent a lot of time asleep on her sofa/​going to stuff and then fall­ing asleep too. It means I missed out on the funtimes. My return flight was from Brat­is­lava, and I’d meant to do some sight­see­ing in the city (it’s about an hour from Vienna on the bus) but I felt so wretched I just went straight to the airport from Vienna. Flying with the flu is not fun, even if it’s only a two hour flight.

On my way out to places I always like to take the clichéd clouds through aero­plane window photos.

This is Vapi­ano, a cafe I went to near my hotel. It’s kind of like if IKEA ran a pizza place.

You choose the stuff you want, add the stuff to an RFID card, they give you a pager, and then when the pager rings you go to the counter to collect the food. When you leave the cash­ier takes your card and you pay up. The food was pleas­ant, but aver­age, the futur­ist­ic meth­od of order­ing being the most excit­ing thing about the place. Turns out they have a branch near where I live now. I doubt I’ll be return­ing, there are so many fant­ast­ic restaur­ants in London.

There are plenty of good places to eat in Vienna, but they’re a bit scared of spices (and don’t get me star­ted on the selec­tion of food in the super­mar­kets …). These satay noodles with tofu were labelled “sehr pikkante” on the menu, but weren’t spicy at all. Still tasty though.

This is the Palmen­haus in the Stadtgarten, a short walk from the hotel. I would’ve liked to go into the cafe, but it was the end of the week and my funds were low. Round the corner is the Hotel Sach­er, home of the famous Sach­er­torte. I was going to get Marcos one (his parents’ bosses had once given him some and he remembered it being deli­cious), but they were ridicu­lously expens­ive, and so I ended up baking him a large one instead, which made him pretty happy.

I am an incur­able post­card writer.

Display I saw in a junk shop.

Bread in a tradi­tion­al restaur­ant.

We went to this bar, Cafe Gold­sch­lag to see a sing­er Mary Ocher. The bar is done up like a vintage living room and they sell glasses of beer or wine by dona­tion. I had a nice time, despite fall­ing asleep and having trouble getting my flu-addled brain to speak German prop­erly.

Here’s Delal trying to get her most beloved camera to work again.

Draw­ing in the kitchen.

Monster!

These were some chocol­ate bars with really great pack­aging I saw at Brat­is­lava airport. I didn’t get any though because the shop was really hot and they were a bit melted feel­ing.