Europe on Two Martinis a Day - Part 3 (Austria)

I am fairly sure that I like Vienna a lot. I'm only fairly sure because nearly all the time we spent in Vienna was spent in shops, since we needed to get Nalan a rucksack to replace her broken suitcase and also ended up buying a digital camera and some decent walking boots for the both of us—in other words, things we should have had before we started our journey. Nalan, on the other hand, is absolutely certain that she loves Vienna, since she can judge a place on the basis of its shopping quality. She can even tell things about a place by its McDonalds. I'd assumed that they were all the same, in fact that the whole point of them was that they were all the same, so that you can eat in a McDonalds in Vladivostok and get the same McExperience that you would in Jakarta; it is partly for this that McDonalds attract so much scorn, and it is this that makes them useful in places where more authentic cuisine might give you dyssentery. But no, there are subtle differences that Nalan picks up on, like the way the arches of Italian McDonalds are bronze rather than yellow (apparently at the insistence of the Italian government). In Vienna we had our first sight of the McCafe, an attempt to up-market and glocalise McDonalds so that people (particularly Europeans) don't feel ashamed to be seen there. Thus it was that my first taste of Vienna's renowned pastries was actually an ersatz McDonalds one - something like a McApfeltortelschplitzen. Even so, it was damned fine cholesterol.



My desire for slightly more authentic Austrian cafe life was met in Salzburg in what we were told was its oldest cafe. The Kuchenpflischenstücken were wheeled round on a trolley creaking under their weight, but were so expensive that we stuck to the coffee, which was some of the finest I have ever drunk. The McCappuccino in Vienna was palatable, but the Salzburgers' verlangaerter was divine. Of course, the Austrians should be good at making coffee, since they were the first Europeans to do so, and the first people anywhere to make coffee without lots of grounds (go anywhere East of Austria and you're drinking some variant of Turkish coffee, despite the Greeks' insistence on calling it Greek coffee and the Macedonians' calling it—you guessed—Macedonian coffee).



Apart from the coffee, there are many other things that make Salzburg delightful. It is a fairy-tale town, the kind of place you'd film something like Heidi or The Sound of Music. Ah, wait—they did film The Sound of Music there. Not being a great fan of musicals, I wasn't aware of this fact until I visited Salzburg, but once there, you cannot escape it: Salzburg has only given the world two famous people: Mozart and Maria von Trapp, but boy do they let you know it. At first sight it looks like everything in Salzburg that isn't about Mozart is about The Sound of Music, but in fact this is not a fair impression. The town is actually stuffed full of culture: there are art galleries, sculptures all over the place, and the concert performed in the cathedral and broadcast in the town square that night wasn't Mozart but Puccini. Actually, I would have preferred Mozart, but I was pleased at their support of diversity.



In the end, though, what impressed us most about Austria was the Austrians. I've met fans of various nations—Francophiles, Turcophiles, Sinophiles and even Anglophiles—but I've never encountered an Austrophile, and I think this is unfair. OK, they gave us Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud, but they also gave us Mozart and, for those who like that kind of thing, Maria von Trapp. They are also the most polite people in the world. Austrian politeness, like Middle-Eastern hospitality, ranges from the impressive to the utterly humiliating. I felt myself wanting to bow to shop assistants. It may be the case that, if election statistics are anything to go by, a lot of Austrians are unrepentant Nazis, but at least they'd be too polite to let you know about it.