Timeless Vienna

We arrived at the Hofburg Palace around 11:00am and immediately I was transported to that timeless place where old culture, architecture and art always seem new again. Our bus let us out at the Viennese Parliament Building, a structure that looks like the beautiful old buildings of ancient Greece, except for the fact that they are all new, undamaged, colorful and shiny. Just walking down the street to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, I thought I noticed men standing just a little taller, and women walking just a bit more elegantly. There is a kind of formality in Vienna that somehow seems perfectly natural.

Unforced.

At the site of the home of composer Josef Haydn, we pedestrians were passed, not by a truck, but by a carriage pulled by horses. Something seems to be in the air here that reminds one of a time when civility was in vogue.

We passed a coffee shop where Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Richard Strauss and other thinkers who changed our world gathered and chatted over coffee every morning. Oh to be a fly on the wall in that coffee shop!

Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven are still alive here. There are as many shops selling pianos as those selling new cars.

We went to the Christmas Market where we grabbed a quick lunch of langos and glüwein. Then we walked over to the art museum to see the world’s largest collection of paintings by Peter Brueghel.

The temperature remained in the low 40’s (F) and the fog thickened, so we hopped on the bus that took us back to our ship for hot chocolate and cookies.

I know Rome is supposed to be “The Eternal City,” but somehow Vienna seems to me to be changeless. The city is like some kind of surreal time machine that takes me back to an era when the world was less complicated, less frantic, more kind and less selfish. Here beauty, decency and civility still seem to prevail. Manners are not out of place. And even if there may be instances where I do not actually see such manners in the streets of Vienna, this city still has a way of bringing out those qualities in me. For that I am grateful.Read more