Vienna, Austria (the alpine country of Edelweiss, no desert with kangaroos…). A place where people work reasonably few hours (call it efficiency if you like…), are happy and filthy-rich. Think of Vienna, and you will inevitably conjure up images of grandieur.
Everything is clean and nice and rococo, and hyperpretentious at the same time; the buildings are awe-striking, and the city is beautiful… really? No it is not. It lacks the authenticity that the other heavy weight of the Austrohungarian Empire, Budapest, oozes. Vienna needs to be cleansed to gain anew the magic it sure had once. For this was a city where East and West met for many years, a German speaking country close to the numerous and vibrant Slavs… yet nowadays is the magic gone and the once majestic Innerstadt has been almost totally drowned in a mass of expensive shops and bright lights to push the prosperous Viennese to consumption. And they revel in it, happy to burn money and enjoy life.
But what should one expect? After all, Austrians let themselves be annexed through a cheap plebiscite. By one of theirs by the way, a guy with a moustache… Each time they tried to be part of anything bigger than a very nice and downright hollow chocolate cake, everything backfired.
And a not so perfect chocolate cake at that! One takes a stroll and sees a city full of rich old ladies strutting in their expensive fur coats, drinking very normal coffee for abnormally high prices; sees lots of tourists obsessed with an anorexic Empress brought back to life in our century by a doomed Austrian actress (poor Miss Schneider, she should have stayed in Vienna…) One takes a stroll and finds perfection in Vienna´s marvellous smell, a blend of Leberkäse and cheap kebab intermingled with horseshite.
I ask myself, what is so special about Vienna then? Well, these are just my first impressions. I´ve been here for just five months, and haven´t had time to delve any deeper into cake city. Logistics kept me really busy during the first days… or rather weeks. Those things take time in Vienna. Two weeks for the flat, four to make it habitable. After having to wait for 40 days (like Noah…) to have my banking affairs running fine, I began to wonder whether I was still in Europe or everything was a delusion and I had actually landed in Nigeria. To be honest, my relations with banks have never been what you would call comfortable, but my bank here in Vienna flaunts an incompetence that brinks on the absurd. Finding a good German course was also a nightmare. Either all the foreigners here speak perfect German (impossible) or there are no high level courses later than 15.00. The latter is the sad yet true reality. I arrived in November and could not find a course until January.
In a nutshell, I have not had enough time to explore the city. My working hours are a nightmare, give that in this country everything closes early, and when I finish with the average ordinary everyday shite, I have to run to get to German on time. To cap it all, winter bites hard, and the prospect of staying out is not one bit appealing.
