Long weekend in Vienna, 2019 - day 3

Sunday 31st March

My birthday! :)

Again, it took me some time to get up and go out. I had kind of wanted to go to a Mass, one held in the Hofburgkapelle (chapel in the Hofburg palace) where the Vienna Boys Choir sing every Sunday. I'm not religious, but I do enjoy choral music. There was another one at 11am at the Augustinerkirche that had not only a choir but an orchestra. Either would have been great, but I was too lazy. Boo!

I'd decided to spend the day at Schloss Schönbrunn, or Schönbrunn Palace, the former summer residence of the Habsburgs (the Hofburg Palace being the winter residence). When it was built it was 20km away out in the middle of the countryside, but of course nowadays the city has expanded to surround it. On the way to the train station I stopped at a nearby konditorei and bought some Linzerschnitte - basically a traybake version of Linzertorte, an almondy cake with a layer of raspberry jam and a pastry lattice top - and put it in my bag to eat at my destination.

It took about 15 minutes on the U-bahn (rapid transit train system/metro/underground, etc.) to get there, then a five or ten minute walk from the station to the entrance to the palace grounds. It was a weekend and a sunny day, and it's a big tourist attraction, so the route was very crowded, but once you get inside the enormous grounds everyone spreads out and it's much quieter. The palace is huge, an impressive Baroque creation in a somewhat yellow colour, and was built to rival Versailles. I'm sure the inside of the 1441-room palace is impressive, too, but I had no intention of spending money to go indoors on a lovely sunny day. I walked round the side of the palace to reach the gardens, passing the Café Residenz I wanted to eat at later, the Privy Garden which has hedges all around so you can't see inside (you need to pay to go in there), and the Orangery, where they hold classical concerts most evenings. The vast grounds are free to enter and open from 6:30am each day, so it's used by locals as a public park and there were lots of runners and dog-walkers around. As I walked around it reminded me of the Tuileries Garden in Paris (which is also a former palace garden), with its wide crushed gravel paths lined with trees, and I wandered slowly, gazing at the greenery and flowers and listening to the birds, and eventually chose a sunlit bench to sit on and eat the linzerschnitte, which was delicious :)

I just wandered the paths for a while, saw the Obelisk and the Roman Ruin (not real, just a folly) and other fountains and sculptures, watched the horse-drawn carriages take people round, and enjoyed the woodland paths surrounded by fresh spring growth and blooming flowers, then traversed the gentle zigzag path up the hill opposite the palace to the grand Gloriette. Built in 1775 (but destroyed in WW2 and subsequently restored), it's both a focal point of the gardens and a lookout point from where you get an amazing view of the gardens, palace, and the city beyond. The imperial family used it as a breakfast room and dining hall and it's now a café, where of course I had something else wonderful to eat: apfelstrudel! One cannot come to Austria and not try some apple strudel, especially if one loves the combination of apple and cinnamon (and pastry). When it arrived I did my thing of breaking into an enormous smile and gasping quietly and breathing "ohmigod!" and giving a quiet little giggle of joy and basically just sitting there for half a minute with a silly grin on my face and dancing inside, haha. I knew it would be the best bit of cake or pastry I'd had yet on the trip, and after my first bite I decided that some of the cakes on my to-eat list would be passed over in favour of a second slice of strudel sometime before flying back home.

View from the Gloriette

The Gloriette

Apfelstrudel!

After that, I headed back down the opposite side of the hill to the Tiergarten Schönbrunn - the zoo. That's right, the palace gardens are so vast that a full zoo (admittedly, compacted) takes up less than a quarter of them. It was founded in 1752 as a menagerie and is the oldest continuously-operating zoo in the world. I hadn't been to a zoo for a few years and thought it would be a nice birthday sort of thing to do. Most of it was the same as any other with all the usual things you expect, but it has a few lovely old buildings and is one of only a few zoos in the world to have giant pandas, although unfortunately they didn't make themselves visible when I went past their enclosure; nor did the wolves in another area. There was a rainforest house in a pretty glasshouse structure, where there were butterflies, a darkened room where bats were flying about around your head (bats! cute!), and even giant fruit bats hanging from the ceiling in the main sunlit area.

On the far side of the zoo on top of a wooded hill is the Tirolerhof, a splendid old farmhouse built in 1722 in the mountainous Tyrol region in the west of Austria, and transported 440km to the zoo brick by brick in 1994. The building is huge, with four floors - the upper levels would have been the family's living quarters, and the lower levels housed the animals (and still do) - and it has the pretty architecture of traditional Alpine buildings. On the ground floor is a small organic farm shop, selling traditional rural fare like hams, cheeses, wholemeal bread and apple juice. I would have liked to try one of the open sandwiches they were selling, but didn't know what anything was or what would be best/nicest, and it was busy and I don't know German (although they would have spoken English), so I didn't get anything. Looking back now I could have just asked what they'd recommend! Oh well, I wasn't hungry anyway, it would have just been to try some good-quality local stuff. There were enclosures for sheep and cows and goats and rabbits, chickens were roaming freely in the woods, and a little way down the hill were some beehives and a good little educational area about bees, which was cool.

The front of the Tirolerhof

From there I went back down the hill and continued around the remainder of the zoo, which happened to be the oldest part of it, with a Baroque imperial breakfast pavilion, then around 4pm I left and went back into the main palace gardens. I found the beautiful Palmenhaus and eventually came back to the Great Parterre, the French-style sculpted garden space between the palace (which is even more impressive close up) and the Neptune Fountain, with the view of the Gloriette on the hill opposite, and from there made my way to Café Residenz.

The Palmenhaus

The Great Parterre with the Neptune Fountain at the far end, and the Gloriette on the hill

Schloss Schonbrunn

It was only 5pm but I was hungry (after all, I hadn't had a proper lunch, just two big slices of cake at 11:30 and 12:30) and needed to have an early dinner anyway, so I sat down at an outside table. In my jeans, scruffy biker boots and bright pink lightweight thermal jacket, I felt too casually-dressed to sit in the elegant interior. Sunset was a couple of hours away and the surrounding buildings were doused in sunlight still, but gradually the shadows took over as the sun went behind the buildings. I had been warm all day, sometimes not needing even to wear my jumper, but there was a bit of a chilly breeze so I put my coat on after a while and was grateful for the blanket they put on every chair, pulling that over my legs. Goulash was just the thing; the traditional Hungarian spiced beef stew came with spaetzle, German potato 'dumplings'. Very yummy! I don't know if I preferred that or the meatballs from the night before. Both on a par and as good as each other, haha!

Goulash with spaetzle

Of course I got dessert. Café Residenz is part of the Landtmanns group which does some of the best patisserie in the city, and they had everything on my to-eat list except Linzertorte. I was very tempted to get Topfenstrudel, a strudel filled with quark (curd cheese) and sultanas, but the Kaiserschmarrn won. Roughly translated as "Emperor's Mess", it's a fluffy shredded pancake served with stewed fruit, and called Kaiserschmarrn because Emperor (Kaiser) Franz Joseph really liked this kind of dish. To be honest, in the end I wished I'd chosen the topfenstrudel, as the kaiserschmarrn was as big as the main course and the pancake was plain, with the only real flavour coming from the apple sauce and spiced stewed plums I dipped the pieces into, so it got a little boring after a while. It was nice, but I didn't love it.

Kaiserschmarrn

After that I got the train back to the city and went back to the apartment where I had a very quick turnaround before going back out again. The reason I had come to Vienna over other places was that one of my favourite musicians was doing a European tour and was performing here on my birthday. Loreena McKennitt is a Canadian New Age singer/songwriter/composer whose music is heavily influenced by Celtic and Middle Eastern themes, and she's been releasing albums since 1985. I've seen her in concert a couple of times before, in Vancouver and London, and she is just as good live as on recordings, her voice and the music is beautiful and it's stunning. Some of my favourites were played - All Souls Night, The Mystic's Dream, The Mummers Dance, The Old Ways, The Star of the County Down, (though sadly not Caravanserai) - and as always she ended with the haunting and beautiful Dante's Prayer. 

So, my birthday ended up being a really lovely day, the best I've had in a few years, full of sunshine and gardens and peaceful places and a zoo and yummy food and wonderful music; so I was very glad! :)