Market Mania

I fell in love with Vienna watching the film Before Sunrise, watching Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy aimlessly wandering the streets of the city, falling in love themselves. Vienna was shown as elegant and grand, but also warm and intimate. Filled with twisting medieval alleys, where secret treasures lay beyond each turn and bend. Shining with baroque opera houses and gilded palaces, displaying the immense wealth and power of the Holy Roman Empire, of which it was the capital for some 200 years.

Vienna is also the Christmas Market capital of the world. Apparently the markets can see as many as 3 million visitors in November and December, 30% of Vienna’s total tourism for the year. This influx of people had the knock-on effect that accommodations were much harder to come by than I’d grown accustomed to and prices were about four times that of the cities that I’d visited previous.

Unfortunately, Vienna came at a low point for me moodwise. I’d been fairly asocial since leaving Stuttgart, with the exception of Berlin. And it felt like it had been nearly a month since I’d seen the sun. The endless gray skies of the late fall had begun to take their toll on me and the days were ending earlier than ever, with the light fading from the sky by 4:30. Mercifully, in Vienna the cold of the previous weeks abated and I was able to stay outside for fairly long stretches and the sun made some brief, but appreciated, appearances.

Visiting Vienna

• Vienna has more than 30 Christmas markets in operation starting in late November. I made it my mission to visit as many as I could over the course of my three days in the city. Honestly, I’m not sure how many I made it to, I think it was about seven or eight. The markets themselves were fairly repetitive, so the most memorable ones were those set in fantastic locations.
  • Schönbrunn Palace hosted the first of the markets that I visited, shown in the title image above. It was about mid-day on a Sunday morning and already the market was bustling. As with the market in Dresden, there were stalls with all sorts of goods and foods, stages, rides, and other amusements, like a skating rink. All of this was set in the square created by the stretched arms of the Schonbrunn Palace, once the summer residence of the Hapsburg Emperors.
  • The Karlsplatz market was laid out in front in front of the majestic baroque Karlskirche, with its patinated copper dome and monumental, columnar minarets.
    

    

  • Belvedere Palace, another Hapsburg residence, now a world-renowned art museum, holds its smallish market right in front of the palace.

    

  • The Rathaus Market is one of the most popular markets in Vienna, and was probably my favorite. It was a good size but was spread out enough that you weren’t constantly bumping into other market-goers. The impressive Weiner Rathaus (Vienna City Hall) overlooks one end of the market while the neo-baroque Burgtheater presides over the other end.

    

• At the center of the old town in Vienna is Stephansplatz, featuring the 13th century gothic cathedral, Stephansdom. It sits squarely in the middle of a luxury shopping street that was decorated to the nines for the holiday season. I walked through Stephansplatz at least twice during my couple of days in Vienna and the entire area was a complete crush of people. It was here, more than anywhere else, that I could really feel the full weight of the tourist season pressing down on the city.
• I spent a day visiting the Albertina Modern art museum. They were hosting an exhibit on modern gothic art that I was interested in seeing. I only remember small bits of that day now, so I feel that I must have been somewhat disappointed with the offerings, though I fear I couldn’t say exactly why.
• On my last full day in the city, I took a walk out away from the city center to the banks of the Danube. Along the walk, I happened upon two of the remaining flak towers from WWII. Twins to the flak tower in Hamburg, though no longer through resemblance. Where the tower in Hamburg had been completely redeveloped into usable, urban space, the towers in Vienna had been left as a stark reminder of the war and its human costs.

• Overall, I was a little disappointed in Vienna. It didn’t really live up to the fantasy of it that Before Sunrise created in my mind. Though, on doing a little research, a fantasy version of Vienna is exactly what the film presented. The Vienna in the movie is cut up and rearranged so that the protagonists can walk down streets that don’t connect to the corners they turn around, they warp miles at a time, bouncing here and there to show the highlights of the city in a way that isn’t possible on foot. And that aligns with my feelings regarding Vienna, it’s very spread out. It’s full of beautiful sights, but it takes some serious effort to get around and see them. It lacks the tight-packed intimacy that I had expected, featuring instead wide avenues and long boulevards. Not bad things on their own, just not what I had wanted out of the city.
• Ending on a positive note, Vienna has these cute LGBT-friendly pedestrian signals at some of their crosswalks.