Coffee - Kaffeehäuser
by morgenhund
Vienna's reputation as a city synonymous with coffee goes back to the Turkish siege of 1683. In the late 19th century they were a centre for the homeless literati who would use a café as a holding address, and there are a number of cafés still open today that boast some pretty famous clientèle. Prices and experiences can vary greatly from one establishment to the other. However, the coffee house is an incredible way to while away the day - people-watching and pondering and letting the world go by as you nurse your coffee. It is curiously reassuring that even if hell were to freeze over, that in the Viennese section there would still be a coffee house open and serving with the same haughty service and the grubby, dog-earred look. Admittedly working life has put paid to my coffee house frequenting - the days of nursing three coffees over an entire day to be able to sit in a warm café rather than a freezing flat are but a memory - but I went through all the varieties of coffee served known to man, which include:
Biedermeyer: A Grosser Brauner with an apricot egg nog added - not my favourite
Brauner: A cup of coffee with a dash of milk (either a Kleiner or a Grosser!)
Cappuccino: Made with whipped cream in Vienna
Einspänner: A black coffee in a long glass with whipped cream
Fiaker: With rum and whipped cream
Franziskaner: with hot milk and whipped cream
Kaffee verkehrt: more milk than coffee
Kapuziner: A black coffee with a shot of cream
Kurz: Like espresso
Mazagran: cold coffee with rum and ice - quite elusive
Melange: Milky coffee with a milk foam (like a normal capuccino!)
Milchkaffee: a very milky cup of coffee
Pharisäer: A strong black coffee or mocha with whipped cream and served with a shot of rum
Türkische: sugared, and served with the coffee grounds in it, from a copper pot.
Verlängerter: Modified Brauner/Schwarzer with a bit more water in it.
Bratislavan budgeting
by TheWanderingCamel
Bratislava is very cheap but you need to have the right currency for some things - museum entries for example - our friendly graduate of the Rosa Krebs School of Charm at the Prelate's Palace made that perfectly clear. If you are in Bratislava at the weekend when the banks are closed, the Tesco store has an exchange office that will be open - and the girl there was delightful.
The unit of currency is the koruna. At the time of writing (October 2006) the exchange rate is approximately 30 koruna = us$1.
Don't change too much, you will find you will almost certainly have money left over at the end of the day. We changed $80 between four of us and even after we'd bought lunch and some beers, icecreams, coffee and a pile of nuts and dried fruit, visited the Prelate's Palace, left money in a donation box at the Cathedral, caught trams and paid for our train tickets back to Vienna, we still had money left over. We could have bought a trinket or two from the souvenir booths near the Town Hall, or caught one of the jolly open-topped red tourist buses around the city I suppose, but even then I think we wouldn't have spent it all.
Vienna's Monuments
by Jmill42
There must be hundreds of various monuments and shrines located all over Vienna. Take the time to stroll around, and you will invariably find a few. My favorite was this Goethe Statue. It is located by the Burggarten Gardens, on the Ringstrasse.
The palace
by iandsmith
My first impression was that it was big. No surprises there. Everything I had read previously indicated size. With the amounts of money rolling in to the Hapsburgs they could afford it.
The monument attracts 1.8 million visitors per annum.
In the 17th century it was destroyed and then rebuilt in rococo style. One of the rooms inside that fascinated me due to its insight into daily life was the study where Franz Joseph began work each day at 5 a.m., dictating to the nation.
Simple meals were served to him at his desk and he took his responsibility to the job seriously. "One must work until one drops from exhaustion" was one of his better known sayings.
Personal portraits here show Franz at the age of 33, the time when the Compromise with Hungary was being negotiated, leading to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
You say Paradeiser, I say Tomate...
by sabsi
You have studied German in school and now you want to go to Vienna to practise? Forget it ;-) Not only do the Vienna people speak a dialect which is hard to understand, even for me as a native speaker of German. It's even worse! They use their own vocabulary for a lot of words! Forget the German words for tomatoes, cauliflower, beans, apricots. From now on it's Paradeiser, Karfiol, Fisolen and Marillen. It takes a while to get used to it. But then it just adds to the charme of the city of Vienna!
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View from the Belvedere
the mural was painted by artist Otto Zitko
Church Mariahilf, Vienna, AT
Emperors Crypt, Vienna, AT
