Vienna
— A visit to the venerable city of Vienna: brittle, elegant and always deep in thought.”
City of Freud and sang froid. City of baroque buildings and baroque desserts. City of deep thinkers and wine drinkers.
Coffee and newspapers and a glass of tap water. Coffee and travel maps and middle-aged friends. Coffee and fearsome old women and their yappy dogs and eternal card games, played in the vitrine glare.
Speaking a softer, music box German. Take it with starchy manners and a friendly formality and a lot of diminutives. Take it with cream.
Intricate, pretty cream slices that actually taste as good as they look. Russian girls that don’t.
City of culture and of cultures. Of rich and poor but mostly rich.
When Athens declined, Vienna one day took its place. And the Turks had them both for a time.
Vienna
Welcome to the fondant fancy city of Vienna, Austria!
Hidden courtyards, dollhouse squares. Massive boulevards that go round and round like the Riesenrad lain down.
Don’t park here. Don’t cross here. English spoken here. Mozart lived here. Mozart died here.
Mozart’s music, his presence in empty parks and emptier parlours. Eat his chocolate, drink his liqueur, take a little bit of him home on your cold winter nights.
They played his Requiem here last month. Next month they’ll play John Cage and a jazz composer called Chick or Buddy. Another month, another delicious poster. The same subject with a new spin. Always new ideas in old Vienna.
See also:
Mozart at the Karlskirche
Mozart left his extraordinarily emotive Requiem unfinished when he died and it had to be completed by another composer.
- Originally published: 13 Feb 2011 in Concerts
Hallstatt
This little lakeside village in the Austrian Salzkammergut region must be one of the most picturesque in Europe.
- Originally published: 13 Feb 2011 in Europe
Kunsthistorisches Museum
An impressive art and archaeological collection and one of the world’s finest, housed in a vast, palatial building in Vienna.
- Originally published: 13 Feb 2011 in Museums & Galleries
Do you want advice with that?
Free motivational messages with my morning coffee.
- Originally published: 15 Jul 2011 in Humour
Stop ACTA!
A privately-negotiated international trade agreement that's anti-sharing, anti-privacy and anti-democratic.
Let's put a stop to ACTA.
Who you gonna call?
Hello, you. I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name as those guys. I'm a user experience consultant, expatriate, traveller, writer and pro cycling enthusiast.
I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert. I started my website in 2005 and I've been running it ever since.
Shameless self-promotion
Over a year in the making, Dopeology.org is my latest personal project: a topology of doping in thirty years of European pro road cycling.
I collected information from thousands of sources, then I modelled and published it via a lightweight user interface.
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