1) I attempted the Café Savoy again, this time for breakfast — but I got there just after 9:30, and they didn’t open until 10 AM, which somehow just doesn’t seem reasonable on a weekday. So I strolled about, and imagine my surprise when I found myself someplace vaguely familiar with a tree and tables and chairs underneath it. My goodness, the Café Sperl! What on earth is it doing here?! I took it as a sign that I should colonize a table outside.
1a) And what a very lovely way to spend a morning, living out the stereotypical American expatriate fantasy of living in Europe: sitting at a café table outdoors writing. (To fulfill the fantasy completely, it should have been a marble-topped table. Details, details . . . ) The air was cool, the sunlight dappling, my little corner fairly protected by shrubs in tubs. And the waiter was agreeably slim and smiling, my coffees were perfect, the butter and homemade raspberry jam on my two rolls exactly right.
1b) I wasn’t just writing, but also texting with a couple friends. The photo I snapped to send one made me look sloppy and stoned. Oh well, in the words of the late Bill Sampson, “Everybody can’t be Gregory Peck.”
2) Still, I had gotten there just before 10 AM, and I left about 11:45. Quite a long time to linger over two coffees and two rolls with butter and jam — but it was one of the loveliest experiences of my entire trip, not just in Vienna.
3) To leaven all the baroque/Rococo/what-have-you Hapsburginess of my trip, I went off to the Kunst Haus Wien, a museum designed by and dedicated to Friedensreich Hundertwasser. I sort of remembered being taken to view the exterior on that 2014 trip, but we hadn’t toured the museum itself.
3a) And there would have been one very good reason for that: the floors are as lumpy as the sea at high tide, by design. From their website: “Hundertwasser considered the architecture of KunstHausWien ‘a stronghold against the false order of the straight line, a bastion against the grid system and the chaos of nonsense.’” So you can’t just walk anywhere; you need to be aware, and woe betide anyone with mobility issues.
Model of a housing development that wasn’t designed because of fear of tourism. (I agree.)
3a.i) Back in graduate school when I was working at the Weekly Newspaper Chain, one of the projects I was responsible for getting printed was the annual calendar, a large-format piece printed in bulk and distributed by the sales team to all the advertisers. The first year I was involved, the designer was married to the idea of reversing the usual calendar grid. She absolutely insisted on putting the days on the left, from bottom to top, and the weeks on top. She convinced the powers that be that to reject this idea was to reject her validity as a designer and as a person. The result: no one who was given the calendar actually used it, because they had to think actively about something that should have been obvious if it had been designed for the user. So while it is, um, interesting to walk across an unevenly wavy floor, it’s not without hazard, and it actively excludes those in wheelchairs or otherwise walking with assistance.
3b) Does that mean no one should visit the Kunst Haus? Absolutely not! It’s a very interesting window into the life and work of an activist artist, Hundertwasser, and some of his innovations in printmaking, ecology, design, and painting. I’m glad I got to go, and that I was reasonably light on my feet to get through without incident (though there were a couple moments . . . )
3c) In the galleries for temporary exhibitions on the top floor was a show called Antimatter Factory by Mika Rottenberg. Her kinetic sculptures recalled for me the wonderful works of Arthur Ganson seen at the MIT Museum, but hers often involved living things, like potatoes in glasses of water sprouting vines. And her mushrooms lit from within — I rather wished there was one in the shop!
3d) There is a little indoor/outdoor café there, and — because I had slept so badly — I was already starting to feel a little woozy. Nothing a bottle of sparkling water and a Croque des connaisseurs sandwich couldn’t help, possibly the first knife and fork sandwich of the trip.
4) My informal plan then led me down some barren neighborhood streets, past a church, alongside the Danube Canal, and over a bridge to the mall — and there was a place there that had Falke socks. Mission: accomplished.
5) The top tier of the Tourist Pantheon of Vienna must include (in random order) Mozart, Sisi, Klimt, Strauss the Waltz King, and sachertorte. The tier below that is probably (again, in random order) Maria Theresa (or Theresia, I’m not here to judge you), the Vienna State Opera, Marie Antoinette, World War II, Wiener Werkstatte, coffee culture, and anything mit Schlag. After that, depending on your depth of knowledge, comes Freud, the Vienna Boys Choir, the rest of the Hapsburgs, and schnitzel.
5a) Of that pantheon, one thing had been notably lacking during my stay. A friend had suggested that I visit Mozart’s apartment, and quite by chance it showed up on my route from the mall to Café Demel. If you love Mozart, you must visit. This is the apartment he actually lived in! The entire building of four floors is a museum, and it is dense with information — about Mozart himself, his music, his domestic life, and about everyone living with him at any given time over the three years he lived here, including his wife, father, students, and his librettist Da Ponte. I found the audioguide especially dense with information, like a slice of delicious cake cut so thickly that it can’t be finished.
6) From there I trekked easily to the Café Demel, where I needed to pick up a couple things. And from there, I hobbled to the subway and back to my room.
Did Klimt have something to do with this?
7) I spent my last evening in Vienna in the hotel restaurant writing over a glamorous bowl of tomato soup (seriously, the wide lip of the soup bowl was gold-plated — what on earth?!) and a club sandwich and a Campari spritz. And I will turn to my packing later; laundry will wait until London. This is not a very, shall we say, Viennese way of concluding this leg of my trip. But aside from the spontaneity of my ending up here in the first place, I’m just wiped out. I hope to return to Vienna again some day, but when I do, I’ll have planned it out much further in advance.