Vienna Roll

In all fairness to Vienna I shouldn’t be posting my online graffiti about it here. I spent a long afternoon in the place, most of that in a museum. It wasn’t so much a skite as a chip off a skite to Bratislava. They make it so easy. The shuttle train goes over and back all day between the two cities for about 8 Euro return. They are only 65 kms apart and the trip takes about an hour. In fact Bratislava airport is the RyanAir airport for Vienna.

The day I went, during Christmas week, the train was boarded by boisterous, clear-skinned gangs of twenty something Austrians in expensive sports casuals who may have been on an adventure, or just doing some budget Christmas shopping. Whatever it was, it was done and they were on their way back home early enough on a Sunday to be in time for church. There was also a more subdued scattering of non-Austrians. Bratislava is something of a late Saturday night to Vienna’s Sunday morning, a little more dishevelled in spots. But then Titania’s palace would look rough and ready next to any plain public building – never mind an opera house or palace – in downtown Vienna, all cream stone and painted railings. As for the Christmas decorations! The city was dolled up like Liberace on concert night - not a burnt out bulb in the rows and wreaths of sparkling lights.

At the Christmas market in Rathausplatz the same ornaments displayed in every Central European city at Christmas – decorations, candles and wooden puzzles, as well as gingerbread and toasted almonds and sausages - were on sale for a premium. And the mulled wine was twice the price of Bratislava (same quality too), plus you had to lay down a mortgage deposit on the ceramic mug. None of your plastic beakers in this here green postcard metropolis.

I happened to have a book with me on this trip, a volume of Arthur Koestler’s earliest memoirs that I had bought at a car boot sale a few days before in Spain – the only English language book I could find. It wouldn’t be your average airport fare, but it had a kind of musty relevance on this trip, since he had lived in Budapest and Vienna, and Vienna is an up-river sandblasted version of Budapest. Almost a hundred years later, the contrast between the two cityscapes and cultures probably hasn’t changed much.

Koestler writes of venturing inside Gerstner’s luxurious tearoom, aged around 15, in 1920, when the “misery of the post-war inflation years in Vienna was at its peak”

“The air inside Gerstner’s was hot, perfumed, and sweet; the sounds were muffled to a low murmur by the thick, soft carpets on the floor, the silk tapestry covering the walls, and the velvet curtains on the doors; it was like the padded interior of a chocolate box. The people who sat chatting and smiling at the small, polished tea-tables all looked wealthy and well-groomed and happy. They were mostly nouveaux riches, speculators and profiteers, for the old bourgeoisie of Vienna had been destroyed by the inflation as finally and completely as if it had been buried by a landslide; nevertheless, this new clientele of Gerstner’s looked perfectly civilised and did not even try to assume blasé manners. The people of Vienna had never learned that an air of boredom is an essential part of savoir faire; and so warmly saturated with tradition was the atmosphere of their city, that the parvenus had already acquired the unique Viennese art of being not only rich but actually enjoying it. They had that courteous gaiety and amused self-mockery and warm malice and flickering erotic spark, which had prevailed at Gerstner’s in the past Imperial days.”

I didn’t get anywhere near the inside of the padded chocolate box. I stayed outside on the cream vellum exterior. But I thought that commentary from an insider-outsider more than compensated for the poor rap the Austrians get today in the soundbite media. I had my bag lifted down from a train for me (not this trip) by a man in full business garb, and it wasn’t because he wanted a date. Three people got involved to help me get a ticket from a machine in the tram when I didn’t have change. The driver had shrugged when I sat down anyway to fiddle with my fiver. One of the three told me there were padded cells in Austrian jails for the likes of me and had a good laugh with his girlfriend. All in English, by the way. At the museum two men stepped aside and held the door.

The Kunsthistorisches Museum had so many Egyptian artefacts, including mummies, giant sarcophagi and even a full height granite pillar, that I couldn’t help but think it is time every country gave everything back. This museum is only in the halfpenny place on that score by comparison with the Louvre, the British Museum, the Metropolitan et al. I just hadn’t been in a major museum for a long while and had forgotten. There were so many Old Masters upstairs – Rubenses and Reynoldses and Rembrandts and Dutch Elders and Youngers and lighter French and Italian fare – that I left bog-eyed. In the end what I can bring to mind easiest are the ghastly – sorry! - fruithead and fishhead paintings of Giuseppe Archimboldo and Jan Steen’s Beware of living the Good Life, a louche scene of vice and disorder. There was a wonderful portrait of Paul the Apostle by Rembrandt and a beautiful portrait of Mary Magdalene by Titian or Tinoretto. But too, too many paintings to see in one day.

All these paintings and artefacts were acquired and assembled by the Hapsburgs, whose origins and achievements were celebrated in a separate exhibit of paraphernalia and thick-crusted brocade capes which could have stood up without help. Most outstanding exhibit of all was the massive shelf on the nose of Maximillian I, which either gave him the martian energies to carve out an empire and found a dynasty or the complex that needed all the trappings of empire to enable him to find a wife.

The Kunsthistorisches is a bang for your buck museum, but far, far better if you live in or around and use one of those season tickets. Having said that, I don’t know if I would be running back every Sunday to see hall after hall of massive, dark religious scenes – crucifixions and transfixions and sermons and sacraments. I was relieved ten minutes walk from the front door to be looking at bling up town in the Rathausplatz, at trees festooned with red heart balloons and falling icicles. I felt like the bespectacled secretary character who throws off her glasses and shakes out her hair at the office party and hits the dance floor. 

Vienna seemed to be a happy place at Christmas, where people were looked after well by their city and kids kept innocent and warm.

Bratislava and the Hotel Kijev

Enjoy the Value

I'm going to do this back to front. Accommodation isn’t the heart of a holiday, but the Hotel Kijev is a special case. A bit of an architectural bastard, a blighted teenager in the old master’s town belying denials that he ever touched the Soviet housemaid. Like most such intrusions, it has many benign and striking features of the kind that shock and ultimately perk up the family. The Kijev was built 36 years ago and must have housed a few vodka-soaked trysts in its day. It is phenomenally huge, especially given the handy size of Bratislava. If you laid the rooms end to end, you could probably put the whole of the old town inside.

From the 14th floor you can eyeball Bratislava Castle on the hill that dominates the town. And if you venture up to the castle (closed like a lot else for renovations that look like they are going to take time), what you see winking back at you is the scarlet 'Hotel Kijev - Enjoy the Value' banner wrapped around the penthouse level of your citybreak accommodation. I can’t think of any reason you wouldn’t be staying at the Kijev, unless you had more money than was good for you. There are over a thousand reviews of the place on Tripadvisor, half of them wailing about the thin walls/ racket/ unstylishness/ grubbiness of it and nearly as many salivating over its ‘retro style.’ Part of its retro style is the yellow Trabant with a blue police light on the roof parked in the lobby. At Christmas this was wrapped, parcel-style, in red ribbon with a bow on the roof.

Smartalecry aside, I found the Kijev to be clean (a few elderly stains on the yellow lino-ish bathroom tiles do not equate to dirt). It was toasty warm in minus 7 to minus 12C daytime temperatures. I paid for a single but got a twin bedded room, which was genuinely retro, with comfortable, low-lying beds, carpet crawling 8 inches up the wall, plain wood panelling and roundy bevelled mirrors. I was able to wash socks at night and toast them dry on a big old-fashioned metal radiator in the bathroom.

The staff were polite, the wifi in the lobby worked a dream and was free, and they had three or four computer terminals as well. There was a dedicated luggage room with an official guarding it, 24-hour reception, slow but working lifts, maps of the town on the wall. There were twin posters advertising stag party deals and the programme at the State Opera Theatre but there were no stag parties in sight and the receptionist was at the opera the same night I was. I told a staff member in a red and gold usher’s uniform that I thought the hotel was terrific and his eyes popped in disbelief. I don’t think he was flattered, but he should have been.

One thing all reviewers agreed on - the Hotel Kijev breakfast is spectacular, and spectacular would be one word for it. Here's what I had for breakfast every day: hardboiled, scrambled and fried eggs, spicy rashers, bacon fat bits, ham slices, spicy sausages, pork slabs, beef goulash, chicken legs in gravy, pasta, pickled and green salad, crumbles, cringles, crispies and chocolate balls, apples and oranges, orange, blackcurrant and multivitamin juice, yoghourt, cake, strudel, cream cheese wrapped in easy singles, brown, white, loaf, rye bread, rolls and baps, 10 kinds of black, green and herbal tea, coffee with hot and cold milk, chocolate sprinkler, butter, jam, blueberry, peach, honey, tinned fruit. Well no, but I could have had. William and the Outlaws would have been climbing the walls to get in.

Mulled wine at the bar or restaurant, open all day until 9.00 pm, was 59 cents, fresh grilled trout 6.50, Greek salad 2.99, Slovakian cabbage soup 1.59, beer 1 euro.

If you needed any more reason to stay here, the Kijev is a couple of hundred yards from the edge of the old town. They have instructions on their website on how to get there from the airport/ train station and they worked seamlessly for me.

My four nights, including breakfast, cost €98. God knows what kind of a multiple special offer deal it was – I booked through a Czech online company One Big Europe just a couple of days before the trip. Normal rates are rather higher, but Bratislava accommodation tends to be expensive for what you get, so this was formidable value, and I sure enjoyed it.

Bratislava Old Town

This is lovely. Not always as impeccably gorgeous as its big sister, Prague, more of a Scarlett Johanssen with tattoos, especially around the edges inhabited by the Hotel Kijev and the Tesco block. But the very heart of it is intimate and beautiful. The little town square had a Christmas Market that, unlike the ones I have seen in Prague, Vienna and Budapest, was more focused on food and drink than on selling ornaments. Around teatime, in 4 inches of snow and with the temperature at around minus 10, a band of half-shepherd/ half-sheep fiddle players in skin waistcoats with the fur outside and embroidered leggings were battering away at a tuneful drinking song and a solid crowd was tapping and singing enthusiastically. There was plenty of drinking and eating going on. All of the huts facing the centre of the square sold food and drink only. Strudel and sausages and roasted peppers and big baps with pork chops and big tangles of fried onion in them. 


You could get ornaments too, round the back. And I managed to get the Sunday singing mass for children in the little old church on the square and that was mellow.

 
There were things about Bratislava that reminded me of Dublin, remarkably the chewing gum on the pavements, a pride in modern urban trivia such as Rubberneck (a bronze street sculpture of a man emerging from a manhole featured in all the official tourist brochures), but also something of the happy underdog good cheer and the sociability.

 Opera

I was steeped. I hadn’t ever seen La Boheme on stage, and I wanted to see it, and guess what was on in the opera house when I was there! What is more, the opera-loving receptionist at the Kijev told me that I didn’t in fact know how lucky I was if I didn’t know that the cast on the night I had booked were a rare and special assembly of the best voices in Bratislava. And they were. I spent some time dressing up for this event – found a shiny green scarf for a knock-down price – and I tanked up with gluwein (watching the shepherd-sheep men) for the slide across town on the ice down to the new opera house on the river (Danube). It was a bit further than I thought so I queued for another mug of gluwein at a booth near the riverbank. What I got was some kind of herbal tea funded by a politician as a public service and they refused my donation and had a good laugh at me, so I moved along quickly.

The performance was in the new opera house on the river bank and it was yet another memorable night in an East European opera house listening to voices trained and music revered by the same system that built the Hotel Kijev. It was utterly wonderful. The ticket cost €16 online (printed out on a sheet of paper) and I was in the centre seat of the front row of the stalls. I could have patted the bald head of the conductor in the orchestra pit if I had reached out. I had a coffee before I went in and it cost about a Euro. The posh lady next to me was in trainers, but I was still glad I had dressed up for the occasion.

Sights

The Castle was closed for renovations. The town hall was closed for renovations. I visited the Primate’s Palace, which had Gobelin tapestries and a hall of mirrors and two ladies checking one ticket who were friendly and proud of the house, which they said, apologetically, was small but lovely. I told them the house was gorgeous and Bratislava was gorgeous, and it is. I’d love to go back with company in the summer and go hiking in the Carpathians and drink Slovakian wine.

Cost

I think it cost around €80 to get to Bratislava from Girona and €50 to get from there to Dublin the day before Christmas Eve. That was travelling last minute, so there’s room to do a good bit better than that but I never begrudge RyanAir a few extra bob. I ate evening meals most days at the hotel and picked up some souvenirs. Bratislava is one cheap and cheerful destination.