We are staying at a very nice campsite in Klosterneuburg, a suburb of Vienna. It’s the nearest campsite we could find to the city but still entails catching a bus and two underground lines to get right to the heart of the city. We’re getting pretty good at working out the various public transport systems of the towns and cities we visit. Of course, it takes time to work out how the various systems work, the routes, costs etc. as well as researching what we want to be sure to visit at every location. Good job we don’t have to work for a living too!
Vienna is a wonderful city so it’s more than sad that one of the abiding memories of it is the pushy concert ticket sellers. They wear embroidered waistcoats and are every bit as persistent and intrusive as any beggars you might encounter in poorer parts of the world, but with less excuse. The city is saturated with them and they must be on a very high level of commission because there were always a dozen or more of them at every tourist spot we visited and they really gave the hard sell. Every time you turned a corner, another one would stop you and it really started to spoil our day. We figure we were approached around fifteen times in the space of a couple of hours.
We had a hot dog and fries at the Bitzinger sausage stand at Albertinaplatz, reputed to sell the best hot dogs in Vienna, and they were darned good. On the roof of the stand is a large plastic green rabbit. There are several of these giant plastic rabbits, in different colours, around Vienna and they are the work of the German sculptor and artist Ottmar Horl. 2003 was the 500th anniversary of Dürer's painting “The Young Hare” and the 3D rabbits were part of Horl’s project in celebration of the original work.
Horl’s rabbit on the roof of the hotdog stand and Roland on the steps of the gallery, both in Albertinaplatz
Queue of horse-drawn ‘taxis’ awaiting customers in Stephansplatz, or you could try one of the cycle taxis
We sat on the steps of the fountain in Albertinaplatz and ate our hot dogs
St. Stephen’s Cathedral
The Hofburg
Stables for the horses of the Spanish Riding School The Butterfly House
On the way back to camp we went to Bergasse 19 where Sigmund Freud established his medical practice in 1891 and is now the home of the Sigmund Freud Museum. He worked and lived here for 47 years before he was forced to flee to London because of the Nazi regime. Roland was disappointed that the museum mainly consisted of story boards rather than artefacts. It was more a site of pilgrimage for those interested in Freud and psychoanalysis and was worth the visit from that perspective.
Outside Freud’s home and medical practice, Bergasse 19, Vienna
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