h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Many is the Austrian who will insist on being addressed by his title and is offended if you write "Sehr geehrter Herr Schmidt"

I would still love to go to Vienna, except I fear I wouldn't want to come home....

Tell me about it...I've noticed they list their university degrees and professional qualifications on the doorbells beside their name!

Yet from all that, you'd expect them to be really snobbish and stand-offish, but I haven't found people to be that way one bit. Quite the contrary.

I'm just having a lazy day, today. I walked into the city centre along the river, had a bite to eat, and now I'm just watching trees, birds and rivers.

I wish I was staying for an extra week: I've just realised my brain has just started to click into thinking in German, when it's almost time to go home!

The Central cemetery [which is not central at all] has some amazing gravestones, some of them X-rated.

Fornicating headstones? My impressionable young mind shouldn't see such things!

Today's my last full day. I'm just going to mooch around and buy a couple of presents, and maybe have a look at some more paintings.

I didn't really do as much as I'd planned, but that doesn't bother me. I really felt the need for a lot of doing nothing-in-particular. And I saw some cool birds we don't get at home, which I was hoping for. Like woodpeckers. I'm still annoyed I didn't get a pic of that - it was sitting just about six feet away, but just as I was about to snap it, it was scared off by a crack battalion of noisy toddlers.

use public transport, please

Oh, worry ye not! I'll have to use public transport to get to the airport anyway, so you're sorted!

When I was in Vienna, my hotel was just around the corner from Joseph Haydn's house, which has been turned into a modest museum. There were original manuscripts of his oratorios in glass-protected displays, and one or two of his harpsichords. I had read about the circumstances of his death during Napoleon's bombardment of his neighborhood in 1809. Basically, the blasting killed Haydn, who was very old and feeble. A few days before he died, he asked his valet to help him get to the piano, where he played the Austrian national anthem [which Haydn had written] and played it as a measure of defiance against Napoleon. Some of Napoleon's soldiers were friendly, appearing at his door and asking for autographs. I expect that they felt devastated on hearing that he had died.

[A few years after his burial, Haydn suffered another loss: someone stole his skull from his grave. It was not found again until the 1950s. ]

Ah! I know roughly where you mean. I'm across the city, at the opposite end, but it's not really that far.

(People who have had their bodies - and parts thereof - stolen would make a good entry. You've got Haydn's skull, then there was a bit of a hullabaloo with Shelley's heart, then a whole range of mummies, and anonymous corpses stolen for medical research...Before anyone chirps up, I'm just suggesting it, not undertaking to write it )

Detectives Bryan and May had a case involving grave robbers. But that's fiction.

Anton Bruckner, an Austrian Romantic composer, had a weird desire to hold in his hands the skulls of famous composers like Beethoven and Schubert. I'm not making this up:
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/apr/01/sex-death-dissonance-anton-bruckner-concertgebouw-orchestra

I'm on the plane now. 'Twas a great week.

Bea - I've a strong feeling you're going to love Vienna.

the shop is called Addicted to Rock, apparently.

Well, after leaving about 9.30 this morning, I've just got in the door.

The good thing about such a long journey is that instead of thinking "crap, holiday over " you think "Yes! home at last! ".

I definitely want to go back though.

I'm glad you had such a good time! You could write it up for and provide a few pictures. Sad not to share.

I could...

It won't actually be all that exciting though, as I didn't actually "do" a lot. It was very much chilling out and deliberately doing nothing.

I do have a few nice pictures, though. I'll have a think about what I can do with them.

is not into that much action. Awix's reviews of Jason S. movies are the most action we read there---and that is without pictures!Don't you want to make others ?

Too late. I'm already envious.

One thing that left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth was the transport zone system for the airport.

For just a couple of Euro, you can buy a ticket that will take you pretty much anywhere in the city. But that boundary ends at the stop just before the airport. You need a second ticket to cover that last little stretch.

Now, it's easy enough to make an honest mistake and think your €2 ticket will take you to the airport, especially if you aren't familiar with the system, which will be the case for many people travelling to the airport, of course.

If you don't have the second ticket, though, they ask to see your passport, then keep it, and tell you to collect it at the police station where you can also pay your €70 fine. It really seems like a system designed in the hope that people will not realise they need a second ticket, so they will have to pay the €70.

The other thing that makes it feel just a little bit like a scam? The airport train line is the only one where they ever check tickets.

That does sound like a scam. Sort of like the one the Bundesbahn used to pull between Belgium and Germany back in the 80s.

We used to take day trips over to Liege. And the ticket sellers there would insist that we didn't need a 'supplement' for the train back, even if it was InterCity. But the Paris to Cologne train DID need a Zuschlag or 'supplement' once you got to Germany. So I'd fuss at them until they sold them to me.

But people would get on, just going to Aachen, and the DB people would get on and demand their Zuschlag - and charge 10 marks for the 3-mark supplement. I thought it was highway robbery, myself, and rude.

That sort of PT Barnum approach doesn't win any friends.

No, it doesn't. I wasn't caught out, because I had the right tickets, but the man across the carriage was, and they were quite rude in the way they spoke to him.

So when my turn came, I presented my valid ticket. But not before I made them wait, and handed them every receipt and scrap piece of paper I had in my pockets.

If receipts for Kaisersemmel bread rolls were banknotes that ticket clerk would be a rich man.