Monthly Archives: April 2010

After a day of 30 degree sunshine, flea market shopping, fabulous lunch avec prosec and an evening at the theatre watching Maxie’s hilariously dramatic death scene, we trussed ourselves up and headed out. Vienna style.

The Tunnel is an underground jazz club on Floriangasse, just round the corner from Maxie’s theatre. Although the rest of the cast tried to convince us to blow out our plans and join them in a pub down the road, Maxie and I stuck to our guns and strolled down to the jazz club, got slightly pissed off that we had to fork over 12 euros to get in even though we’d missed the first set and settled down in a booth at the back beside a slightly redneck-esque austrian couple, and ordered zwei grosse gruner vetliner…s… (please forgive my german spelling) and waited patiently…

…for the most AMAZING blues duo ever!

I have no idea what they were called, there was a name mentioned but it was so darn Austrian and I have not the memory for such things. When the music was playing and they were singing, you would swear you were in the deep south… and then all of a sudden the music would end and the amazing guitarist and the mind-blowing harmonica player would speak…

YEP! Definitely DEFINITELY Austrian. Geeeeez.

So turns out gruner vetliner is loopy juice. Maxie and I drunk a lot of it. I have a photograph of myself lodged in the window of an Austrian sex shop that was taken (and I’m using the date/time on the photo to confirm this btw) on the way home. We got home and drank more prosecco, and promptly passed out, only to rise bright and early on my final day in Vienna ready to embark on another sunny adventure…

RitziCx

So, after Maxie and I had a fabulous Londonia style reunion at the airport – and after I finished my espresso – we hopped onto the CAT (a double decker TRAIN, people) and were in town quick as a flash.

O. M. G.

Vienna is frickin AWESOME! I mean, we came out of the station and I was actually speechless for significant amount of time. I would be half way through telling Maxie a nice juicy bit of West End gossip and then I’d get distracted by the pretty pretty buildings. We wandered for ages, me staring around me in awe and thinking why the heck have I never been here before??? all the while. Eventually, our wanderings brought us to Cafe Hawelka – a super duper smoke filled little place on Dorotheergasse (check me out knowing street names) with a super hero style secret identity – coffee house by day, bohemian wine bar by night!

Apparently back in the day, super awesome artisty types like Hans Weigel and Oskar Werner (no idea who they are but they sound cool) used to hang out here. So I figured, being the super awesome artisty types that we are, that Cafe Hawelka would do just fine for me and Maxie. And oh… it did.

Smoking ban? What smoking ban? Everything in this place was on the right side of hazy, and the wine was served in half pints. Maxie tells me this is because we were British and the sexy yet exploitative Austrian barman thought we could be taken for a ride. Fair enough. I’d had a half pint of red wine by then… I didn’t care.

Then, the sexy sexy waiter man brought out some random little cake like things filled with plum jam. Oh my god. Apparently, I have since discovered, they are called Buchteln desserts and were baked by Josephine Hawelka until she died in 2005. I’m hoping someone else does it now and the ones we had weren’t leftovers.

A few hours and plenty of chats later, Maxie had taught me enough German for me to go to the bar and ask where the toilet was, but not enough for me to understand what the heck the barman was saying when he answered me. Ah well! Also, she taught me my first important lesson of getting sloshed in Vienna; If you say ‘danke’ when you give someone money, it means ‘keep the change’.

So what did I do when I handed over a twenty?

“Danke – shit! I mean no! Not danke! Oh crap.”

Oh Ritzi. Don’t try to speak other languages. You muppet.

So on one hand, I lost 3 euros. On the other, I’d just spent my first night in Vienna with one of my best friends getting a tad hammered on half pints of red wine and Buchteln cakes.

Fair price I’d say!

RitziCx

So this weekend I spent 43 hours in Vienna. As one does.

Let’s first of all have a hooooooooray for the fact that I bloody made it there! I was well and truly convinced that the Ashcloud would thwart my attempts to leave the country for the closest thing to a vacation I’ve had for FIVE YEARS… but I defeated the Ashcloud! At 4pm on Friday afternoon, I slipped casually out of my office, skipped down to Picadilly Circus and hopped on the tube to ride to the end of the line. An hour later… Heathrow! With planes actually taking off! Victory!

Can we have a moment for how freakin easy checking in is these days please? Good lord, I got myself there with an hour and thirty minutes til my boarding time, fully prepared to queue and get naked scanned and whatnot, but nope. I ride the escalator up to the airport, I check myself in on a touch screen computer, chosing myself a nice window seat… and then I have and hour and twenty five minutes of nothingness! Being a jetsetter is easy!

An hour and twenty five minutes of resisting duty free later, I sat down on the plane, looked to my left and couldn’t believe my luck when I saw I was sat beside a tall, dark, handsome man with a suit and good cheekbones.

Of course, I could believe my luck when he took out a German newspaper, couldn’t understand a word of English and apparently had an irrational fear of flying.

Typical.

So, with Joe Cocker in my ears and an untouched ‘vegetarian option’ cheese sandwich in my lap, I laughed in the face of the Ashcloud and flew to Vienna. Yey!

My flight got in early so I sent Maxie G a text (how much did THAT cost me?) and found the nearest coffee bar, realising very quickly I’d have to learn how to say some key phrases like ‘I’ll have a strong black coffee please’ and ‘Where the heck is the toilet?’ if I was going to survive the weekend. I settled for gestures and pointing for the time being, and had just handed over what I HOPE was the right amount of euros when I heard a very non-german whistle and turned to see the hot pink flash that was Maxie G racing across the arrivals hall toward me, stage makeup and carefully curled hair still well and truly intact.

And all was right with the world.

RitziCx