Vienna rocks!

It’s not all about Mozart, chocolates and cher ubic choirboys. Ramsay Shor t spends a wintry 48 hours in one of Europe’s most underrated capitals.

BOTTOMS, BEER AND WIENER SCHNITZEL

The thing about Austrian girls is that they have big behinds,” Torsten says, as he puts his foot on the pedal of the twoweek- old BMW 5 Series and speeds down the autobahn from Bratislava to Vienna. “Too much Sachertorte. But it’s OK, because Vienna is the gateway between east and west, and we have lots of Slovak and Russian girls. They are very skinny, you know.”

Sadly, I don’t know and decline his offer to take me to a “hot girls club”, although I do later discover how much the Viennese love their cakes. I have just arrived on Ryanair’s late Thursday night flight to Bratislava, and my hotel in Vienna – the newly opened, designer Levante Parliament – has laid on Torsten and his limo to ferry me into the cold Austrian capital. For my first experience of a Vienna native, he’s nothing if not amusing.

About 45 minutes later, including a detour in which Torsten drops me at the wrong hotel after getting carried away talking about his celebrity passengers – Madonna, Robbie Williams and a gaggle of go-go girls ordered by a well-known Russian billionaire – we finally make it to the Parliament, where a glass of complimentary fizz is waiting at the bar.

The next morning, I wonder seriously what Torsten was on about, as sitting in the lobby, smoking and sending bitchy looks at each other are at least a dozen extremely attractive, extremely skinny girls. Most could not be older than 19, and they are all Austrian – here to film the latest TV series of Austria’s Next Top Model. I’m clearly in the right place.

I ask a particularly tall blonde why she’s smoking. “Isn’t that banned indoors in Austria?”

“No, oh my God, no way, what would I do if I couldn’t smoke?” she replies in English, with barely a hint of an accent.

I quickly find out that smoking indoors is still the norm in Vienna, and un-PC Austria is one of the last EU member states not to have embraced such a ban. Getting used to the sheer amount of smokers (and the smell staining your clothes) is just another quirky aspect to one of the most beautiful and underrated capitals in Europe.

Take the doors, for example. All the doors open the wrong way. For some reason, and no one I ask offers a definitive answer, the doors push out onto the street rather than open into the hall. Distracted by the smoke rings emanating from the blonde’s perfect lips and the rather large fellow who suddenly appears to tell her not to talk to anyone but the other girls and the crew, I fail to notice the diminutive man with light-blue-shaded glasses until he taps me on the shoulder.

“Ramsay? I am Rainer Lefevre, your guide to Vienna. Shall we begin?” he asks, staccato-style, sounding much more Austrian than the model.

In the freezing December cold, Rainer takes me on a walking tour through the wide streets of this former imperial capital, which at the moment is smelling very Christmassy of glühwein and gingerbread. For the first-timer, Vienna is quite simply breathtaking. Among the sights are its fabulous palaces, brilliant museums, sinuous art-nouveau and baroque buildings, and even the amazing Ringstrasse – a wide avenue encircling an old town so rich and undamaged by war that it has actually been designated a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Seeing all this, it’s easy to understand how so much of the world’s most extraordinary classical music was composed here. Mahler, Mozart, Schoenberg, Schubert, two Strausses and Haydn (the 200th anniversary of whose death is being celebrated this year) all lived and worked in the city. Inspired, I find myself humming The Marriage of Figaro as we reach the ornate façade of the Vienna Opera House.

Going back in time, you can sense how Allied-occupied Vienna (1945–1955) was a bed of Cold War intrigue. You can breathe Carol Reed’s The Third Man in the winding streets, elegant squares and tranquil parks of the First District, and shiver when you see the famous balcony where Adolf Hitler proclaimed the Anschluss to thousands of saluting men in the Heldenplatz.

Rainer, who has been a Vienna tour guide for the past 22 years, is highly informative as he walks and talks rubbing his hands together for warmth, his eyes seeing the world through the blue wash of his lenses. He points out the Hofburg Palace, the imperial seat of power for centuries, and takes me through the Imperial Apartments and the Spanish Riding School, where the famous white Lipizzaner horses dance for gawping tourists.

We take a coffee in the Café Landtmann, where Trotsky played chess and theorised on communism in his exile from Russia. We visit the legendary Café Central, where Freud often sipped the black stuff and considered the Oedipus complex. We eat chocolate cake in the royal patisserie Café Demel. Later, I get lost in the Secession – Gustav Klimt and his fellow secessionists’ modern art museum, founded in rejection of the Viennese Museum of Fine Art. Klimt’s 34m-long Beethoven Frieze, a pictorial interpretation of the composer’s Ninth Symphony painted in 1902, is magnificent, full of lust and passion.

But Vienna is not all high culture and history. Mention Austria to young Europeans today and you are more likely to hear talk of the late right-wing politician Jörg Haider, incestuous paedophile Josef Fritzl, or even The Sound of Music than Klimt or Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the novelist who gave his name to “masochism”. No, when it comes to cool European getaways, we are more likely to consider Berlin or Barcelona than Vienna.

After taking my leave of Rainer, who waves me off with a sincere “Goodbye, sir” – the older Austrians I meet are extremely formal and polite – I move hotels to Le Méridien located right opposite the stunning Burggarten park. It’s here that I meet up with Princess Horst.

Princess, as he likes to be called when he’s not working as a business consultant to young entrepreneurs, is very gay and very funny. First, we head off for dinner at a traditional, communal dining-style beisl, for some incredible Wiener schnitzel – a veal cutlet in breadcrumbs that’s perfectly crispy on the outside and juicy within. We also meet Gina Drewes, a 32-year-old fashion designer whose latest collection, “Heartbreak Hotel”, is on show at the Lila Pix boutique, a trendy, independent clothes store behind Vienna’s biggest shopping street.

After we finish eating, we all head off to Berfin, a Turkish bar, to smoke water pipes and drink. Gina is busy waxing lyrical about the city she loves. “It’s extremely creative and happening, although things work at a slower pace than in London or Paris. But that’s the beauty of Vienna. It allows you space to do things, to create, and doesn’t cost the Earth.”

Princess Horst, the lovely Gina, late-night drinking, partying and indeed Turks are all part of what gives Vienna such a moving underground cultural energy, over and above all the highbrow pleasures the city has to offer. A vibrant gay community flourishes and the increasingly large Turkish population, alongside the influx of eastern Europeans moving in with the open borders of the EU, are forcing the Viennese to become more open, liberal and less conservative. The fact that it’s big enough to excite, yet still cosy enough to relax in is a brilliant selling point.

Seeking relaxation I spend a hungover Saturday morning roaming the food and flea market, known as the Naschmarkt, which stretches from Karlsplatz to Kettenbrückengasse. Here you can bargain for everything from fresh ravioli and sugared sweets to innumerable spices, Czech glass and antique porcelain dolls. And after picking up a few souvenirs to take home, I settle in for a late-breakfast melange (café au lait) at Café Drechsler, recently given a makeover by UK designer Sir Terence Conran.

The afternoon takes me record shopping to a couple of independent stores, including Substance, where part owner Thomas Gebhart introduces me to the local music scene and Vienna’s most famous hiphop group, The Waxolutionists. Then it’s a trip to the former imperial stables, today incredibly morphed into the Museum of Modern Art, the Children’s Museum, the Fine Art Museum and, my choice to check out, the lovely limestone Leopold Museum. Here, an Egon Schiele retrospective – Klimt’s one-time protégé, who died at the age of just 28 – takes my breath away.

Departing later in the evening for Bratislava airport, this time in the shuttle bus not the limousine, I ponder happily how much energy there is to Vienna’s beautiful imposing streets and its people. And how despite the fact there is so much behind it, Austria’s capital has the feel of a city on the edge, with so much about to happen – and I can’t believe I’ve never been before. The only thing I leave frustrated about is that I didn’t get to tell Torsten how all the Austrian girls I met had some of the greatest behinds I’ve seen! On my next trip, perhaps.

Hot list
Eat, drink, sleep

STAY: LE MÉRIDIEN Modern and trendy, with a permanent art exhibition in the lobby and a popular bar and restaurant. The location of Le Méridien can’t be beaten, and the 294 rooms are more than comfortable, with stylish standalone baths in most, as well as free wi-fi.
13–15 OPERNRING, TEL: +43 (0)158 8900, WWW.LEMERIDIEN.COM

EAT: FIGLMÜLLER Traditional Austrian fare, beisl-style. Eat Wiener schnitzel so huge it overhangs the plate – perfect with some local wine.
5 WOLLZEILE, TEL: +43 (0)15 126 177, WWW.FIGLMUELLER.AT

PARTY: VOLKSGARTEN One of Vienna’s best nightclubs, named after the famous park nearby. Expect a super-trendy, up-forit crowd and different nights offering everything from soul and funk to dirty house and electro.
1 BURGRING, TEL: +43 (0)15 324 241, WWW.VOLKSGARTEN.AT