Vienna is big and frankly complicated!
First complication how to get in there? It's not as bad as buying tickets for trains in England, but there are various combinations and possibilities depending on the number of days and whether you want reductions to concerts etc. When it came to it I just went for the one day 'shopping ticket' which was not the cheapest way. The other thing is that you need two tickets because Klosterneuburg is not part of Vienna. So you need a ticket to Heiligenstadt and then another from there to Vienna. So transport for the rest of the week has yet to be decided. Heiligenstadt however is a name well know to all music students. It's where Beethoven was staying when he wrote his will. But that's another story to explore.
The second complication is that I didn't have a decent street plan. The one in the book didn't have the names of all the streets; the one with the names of all the streets was made of thin paper and fell apart rapidly. So I got the train in to the central station and then walked - a lot. It was about 40 minutes from the station to the old town. I had decided to do a fair amount of walking today to get a feel for the place and I had hoped that in walking there would be lots of things to drop in and see. But Vienna is not quite like that. There is a lot to see but it's all quite far apart and it wasn't along the route from the Franz Joseph Station to the old town. So there is no option but to get my head around the transport system and get the right ticket!
However, on the bright side I visited the 'Mozarthaus' near the cathedral which I stumbled on by accident though would have found eventually. I got a reduction without having to lie about my age - the girl at the desk had no idea about the difference between 57 and 60!
Lots of talk about the cathedral but I found it disappointing. Mass was about to start the first time I tried so the main part was closed. The organ was trundling through several verses of 'To Jesus' Heart all burning' which I haven't hear for a very long time, fortunately. The organist was, I think, bored with it in the way he was playing it in the way I would have been if I'd been playing it. It was as though he was reading the paper at the same time or thinking what he was going to be doing over the weekend. That's a phenomenon well know to organists! I could only think that it had more 'whizzy' words than the version we used to sing 40 years ago otherwise why bother?
There are people dressed as Mozart trying to flog tickets for concerts. One of them tried to interest me in a ticket. They are 'tourist concerts' with scratch orchestras of people dressed in costume playing 'excerpts' from things. I said I was more interested in proper concerts of Beethoven, for example. He said Beethoven only lived in Vienna for two years and he was German. Wrong on both counts but it's true that there is little or no sign of him - it's all Mozart and that's not why I came!
So, the sun has shone all day though it has not been very warm because all the buildings are tall and the streets are mostly in the shade, but nice all the same. My homework now is to decide exactly where I want to go in the coming days, and how to get there. The good news is that because I did not stamp my ticket for Vienna transport system (I didn't realise I had to) I've got it to use again. It was explained to me by the lady in the information office at the underground station, so it's official.
Now - starters, steak and mushrooms, cheese and a few glasses of wine. That's all till tomorrow.
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