roads of stone » Vienna

119. Schönbrunn, Vienna

Roads — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:10:19 +0000

There’s always the sun
The Stranglers, October 1986

As I wake in my hotel in the eastern city suburbs at 7 am, I can still hear the strains of the Viennese Boy’s Choir departing from their programme to sing ‘Jerusalem’ at last night’s client reception. I can still picture the grandeur, imperial opulence and enormous chandeliers of Vienna’s Coburg Palace.

And I can still taste that final beer I slugged much later in the hotel bar. At the time, there had seemed no better way to wash down the five different white wines we’d enjoyed at dinner. But now I’m not so sure.

I try to envisage my day. A doze perhaps, a hesitantly edgy breakfast, and then a hot summer U-Bahn and tram journey beside the Danube and Prater ferris wheel to reach the exhibition centre. Long trade show hours stretching forwards.

The June sun is streaming past the curtains which I neatly failed to draw late last night. I won’t get back to sleep now. And so, half-heartedly at first, I stagger out of bed to rummage through my bag for running kit and trainers. I turn back briefly at the door to don my sunglasses, just in case I scare a colleague in the hallway, but there’s no one. The lift and lobby are equally deserted, and then I trot across the forecourt to reach the Linke Wiene Zeile, and stop gratefully at the first red pedestrian light to catch my breath.

It’s a dismal part of town here in many ways. Not much to distinguish it from any other central European city. Flats, shops, railway line, cars.

A lot of cars. The early rush hour traffic dashes past me out of the sunlight, pumping its citybound commuter bloodstream down the Meidlinghauptstrasse whilst I wait to catch the green before lurching a hundred metres further on to Schönbrunnstrasse.

In these quieter residential quarters the day is much more faintly stirring. The street is lined with trees and local shops, the highway behind is nothing more than distant hum now, and there’s a morning stillness in the air which belies anticipation of a summer day ahead. I shamble along the pavement with no great form or pace, past a mother walking kids and backpacks off to school, and nod politely to a pair of old men talking on the street corner as they await the bus. A delivery driver pulls over in front of me to unload beside the baker’s, but stops to wave me past, whilst outside the paper shop a casually-dressed businessman is gesticulating gently into his mobile phone.

Five minutes have gone by – the hardest part of any run. I pause to cross another junction, and then I leave the road, head through the wrought iron gates and into the palace grounds.

Schönbrunn. Austria’s own Versailles – and it nestles here, in the heart of this undistinguished and unlikely suburb.

Gravel paths and leafy shade reach ahead of me now. The track curves past an obelisk and steeply upwards. It’s just a minute’s climb, but much too hard for me this morning, so I pause halfway and take some air where an unexpected cut in the trees frames a narrow glimpse of the Vienna skyline and Dom far below. I stop a moment, then half run, half walk up the final stretch and at last I’m there. Atop the Katterburg.

Crowning the hilltop stands a fantastically grand imperialist folly, shining yellow in the sunlight. The famous Gloriette. To my right, a lake, and then a vast swathe of ornate gardens reaching out to the Schönbrunn Palace itself and the whole of Vienna laid out beyond. Begun in 1696 at the order of Emperor Leopold I, Schönbrunn was the very centre of Austria’s empire right up until the downfall of the monarchy in 1918. Today it’s a World Heritage Site, remembered also as the place where Kennedy and Kruschev met in 1961.

I catch my breath and look around a moment, at the details of the architecture, at the pattern of the gardens and the scale of the palace, and the view of the city unfolding far below. I’m not sure now if I’m here to run or wonder, but it doesn’t really matter. I’m here, and that’s enough.

I lope a little further along a smaller pathway through the trees. An uphill minute or so of leaves and dappled sunlight goes by, another clearing, and a moment later I’m deep in darkest green again, before turning right onto the broader course of a wider downhill path.

The Tiergarten (Zoo) is below me and a solid wall of trees above. A moment later, they open up to reveal another narrow cut. It’s ten metres wide, no more, undulating like some devilishly designed fairway rising up towards the Gloriette. I try to play that rifle-straight two-iron tee shot in my mind, but I fear I might just find the trees.

A minute later and I’m on the flat again. It’s a Canaletto view from here, of open lawns and pretty flower beds spreading out towards the palace, a fountain and the hilltop folly beyond. Runners are emerging from all the paths around – the summer heat must still be young and unaccustomed, I reason, for not one of them is running fast. Some are even walking, flicking cross-country ski poles elaborately in front of them with every stride, a laconically feeble upper body workout if ever I saw one.

The entrance to the maze lies just beside me, the German ‘Labyrinth’suggesting something far more mythically difficult than Hampton Court might offer. That sets me thinking, and it’s true as well that the linguistics of the Irrgarten (puzzle garden ?) likewise speak more volubly of deep confusion than the English ever could.

Ich habe geirrt – I’ve made a mistake, a foolish error – those are words which a repentant politician, or a hungover early morning runner might so easily say. A row of white stone statues brings me to the palace now, and perhaps indeed it’s time to head for home.

I trot past the palace and towards the city skyline, across the gravel glade, through the gates and back into the suburbs stretching ahead outside.

It’s gently downhill now, and I run a more fluid, more easily contented mile than the one which came the other way. Past the Metzgerei, just opening up as the Meidling clock strikes eight, then across the highway and to the hotel.

A colleague spies me then, as he stands there at the doorway.

‘Been out running ?’ he says (perceptive type), as I bound lycra-clad past him into the lobby, sweating freely from last night’s sauvignon and this morning’s summer sunshine. I turn around and smile.

‘Yeah. It’s only ten minutes out to the Schönbrunn Palace from here,’ I breathe. ‘Quite fantastic architecture – and wonderful gardens, too.’

‘Oh, really ?’ he offers blankly. And then he opens the taxi door and climbs inside.

He’s unaware – that half an hour, and a little effort, is all it takes to see a different side of any city. I’ve told him now, and yet still I’m sure he’ll never know.

72. Vienna

Roads — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 20:18:09 +0000

Walked in the cold air
Freezing breath on a window pane
Lying and waiting
A man in the dark in a picture frame
So mystic and soulful

The warmth of your hand
And a cold grey sky
It fades to the distance

The feeling has gone only you and I
It means nothing to me
This means nothing to me
Oh, Vienna
Ultravox – July 1980

Central Europe. December. It’s a long time since I’ve been here, and the feeling has eluded me recently, but perhaps it’s never quite gone away.

Cold, dark night. A clearing sky, with the promise of frost on the way. The screech of a tram rounding the corner behind me. Expensive shops, dramatically decorated for the season. Fantastic displays of pastries and chocolates, beckoning from warmly lit windows. Thronging Christmas markets, selling enough candles to light up the whole of Lower Austria. Elegantly dressed folk, scurrying through Stephansplatz on the way out to dinner, or lingering sociably in the street to drink steaming hot punch on their way home from work or shopping. We join them. It has to be done.

The veil of Christmas lights falls like a curtain down Kärntnerstrasse, leading my colleague and I to the Architecture Quarter. I’m sure it’s not actually called that, in any of the guidebooks, but that is what it is. A whole sector of Vienna, which is just stuffed full of the most superb and dramatic buildings that you’ll find, anywhere in the world. The glory of the Austro-Hungarian empire is not just preserved here – it lives. And if Mozart himself were to walk around the next corner to meet us, frankly neither of us could be in the least surprised, for this part of the city is surely just as he left it. It’s an architectural theme park of the highest order.

We stand outside the Hofburg Palace, gazing at the intricate gold relief of the roof, the million fine details which go to complete this picture, and we fall silent. For really, there is not that much which you can add to perfection.

We stroll on to Stephansplatz, dominated in the dark by the huge floodlit roof of the cathedral. A zig-zag pattern of precipitous tiles looming floodlit over the square. I can’t imagine who could have come up with this mad design feature, or even which audacious official approved the plans. It must have looked bizarre on the blueprints. But it works.

There’s no fixed plan this evening, but we have to find some food. Eschewing the tourist haunts with their international menus and pictures of uniformly unimaginative sausage and chip dishes, we search around for a restaurant which is somehow more, well, Viennese. But how to find it ? My Spanish profesora gave me the traveller’s secret, long ago one hungry evening in Zaragoza. ‘Just ask a fat policeman’, she said. ‘They always know where to eat’. We’d tried her strategy, that very night, and it had worked, brilliantly.

We hunt around for culinary advice, but there’s not a copper to be seen. They were probably toting their leather jackets and pistols on the fast Autobahn to the airport. I try the next best thing, and go into a baker’s shop, serving warm Apfelstrudel and Kirschentorte, and ask the roundest assistant behind the till. She’s not sure, still recovering from the laughable sound of an Englishman speaking German with a rich but rusty Swiss accent (think of Jan Molby’s comically broad Scouse, or Peter Schmeichel’s Mancunian, and that puts you right there). A friendly local comes to our aid, pointing us around the corner to find the marvellously welcoming Plachutta. ‘Man kann dort sehr gut essen‘, she says. They eat well there.

And I can tell you now, she wasn’t wrong. Two hours later, after a couple of the biggest Rindsuppen and beef Schnitzel Spezialitäten, we emerge warmer and wiser back into Wollzeile. We will never be Viennese, but in ordering Tafelspitz, my colleague at least has eaten half of Vienna itself tonight, and we are at one with the city.

It’s been seven years since last I was here. I was a new runner then, and Vienna offered the backdrop to some marvellous early runs. A couple of 7 am outings around the fountains and flower beds of the Stadtpark. And one day I’d taken a number 38A bus up to the top of the Kahlenberg, high above the city, and run many miles down through vineyards, past ripening grapes all the way to the banks of the Danube and then back into the centre. That was late summer, but this is a colder season, not so conducive to running, and in any case I’m still laid up at the moment.

Tonight, on my last evening, I decide to hail Shanks’ Pony for the return journey from the Luxmarkt back to the hotel. It’s only five stops on the metro, although it turns out to be the better part of an hour’s walk through the cold winter evening. There’s no snow, just ceaseless traffic on the Linke Wienerzeile as I head reluctantly out of this renaissance utopia and through the bleak fifties and blank sixties suburbs that inevitably must surround even the most perfect of architectural wonderlands.

The long, cold walk offers welcome exercise and reflection time for an injured runner. You can substitute as much swimming as you like, and I’ve splashed another fifty lengths today and there’s another hundred in the plan before I fly home, but it just doesn’t cut it as a catalyst to quality contemplation.

Sure, I can think about stuff when I’m swimming. But it’s hard to truly ponder whilst counting (imagine the torture of getting up to seventy-something and forgetting how many lengths you’d done), and whilst ensuring you don’t absent-mindedly drown amidst those breathless front crawl lengths. And the scenery doesn’t change much. This hotel pool is superb, with a waterfall at one end, and an outlook from the poolside across the roofs to the Stephansdom. But however great that view, you can’t actually see any of it when you’re swimming.

So now, in the long and cold December night, I can just walk and think. And I think I’ll be back. Oh, Vienna.