Last updated: October 2026
Cami C and I were torn between Greece and Austria; flights were around fifty or sixty euros return. In the end she decided not to go anywhere, and I went on my own to Vienna. Out with Vueling, back with Wizz.
I walked past Café Sacher, the one that says it created the Sachertorte (Franz Sacher, aged sixteen, in 1832). The queue was so long I did not join it. Then I went to a restaurant and ate a schnitzel, first cousin of our milanesa. The true Wiener Schnitzel is breaded veal with nothing inside; the one filled with ham and cheese is called cordon bleu.
St Stephen's Cathedral is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I filmed it and climbed the south tower: 343 steps up to the old watchman's room. The north tower, with the Pummerin bell, has a lift.
I did a group walking tour of the old centre, one of the tip-based ones (you book free on GuruWalk or Civitatis and pay what you think it was worth at the end; always leave a tip). I recommend them in every city. This one was full of history: Vienna was the capital of the Habsburgs and of an enormous empire, Austria-Hungary. And the guide told how in March 1938 Austria did not resist: Chancellor Schuschnigg announced he would not use the army, German troops crossed on the 12th, and on 15 March Hitler spoke from the terrace of the Neue Burg, over the Heldenplatz, to more than two hundred thousand people. He showed us the balcony.
I also went to the Sisi Museum, in the Hofburg. Empress Elisabeth had a room where she did gymnastics, and the wall bars, the high bar and the rings in the door frame are still there. For an empress of the nineteenth century, that was scandalous; that is part of why she is remembered as the rebel.
Wizz Air is Hungarian, and like JetSMART in South America and Volaris in Mexico it has Indigo Partners, the fund of the American Bill Franke, behind it (Frontier, in the United States, too). What I noticed: new planes and good service, nothing like the old broken planes you imagine in a low cost.
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