In Vienna we sit in a late night cafe....

Vienna ... well it didn't do much for me. I don't want to down on the town because my reveiw could impact on the crowds planning to go to Euro 2008 in Austria (thats right my word is becoming that powerful across the world or so i hear anyway!) but i think we were pointed in the wrong direction a bit..


If you are going to Euro 2008 in Vienna stay at the Hostel Ruthersteiner, it had the lot. Sweet kitchen with tonnes of pots and pans, a pumping bar with some cool bar tenders, awesome outside areas and small rooms so people don't hide out in there but are forced into the common areas. Just if you can play the piano, don't sit down and play "Heart and Soul", the bar tender is likely to slam your fingers shut in the lid of the piano, then do some unpleasent things to you with piano wire... Well ok so maybe thats what i thought the bar tender should do rather than his actual thoughts but don't play this song to me for the next 6 months at least.. Also i am going to have to delete all jeff buckley off my ipod as this brazillian guy kept singing buckley songs in the court yard and esposing the virtues of a guy that released one and a half albumns. I mean give me a break. And he was rubbish aswell. But thats ok, he added to the melting pot and they gave me something to hate which made everything else seem so much better.

So we went to the Sigmund Freud Museum. I thought i was going to learn about phsycho analysis and be able to have a crack at analysing some people back at the lodge.. Unfortunately unless you are unhealthily interested in Freud and his life then there isn't much there for you. In fact nothing on his whole field, its assumed you know already, that you have already done 5 years at uni and that you have come to see his waiting room and his suitcase. It was dissapointing. It made my analysis later that night of those around seem a little incensere and hollow ... That guy with the stupid hat he's a tool, that girl in the pink singlet she is loose with her morals and the guy in the corner wants to be a bumble bee (that one was easy he was dressed in yellow and black and had a jar of honey).

We also visited the Kaiser Apartments (nothing to do with the band), this is the home of Austria's last emporer and his manic deprissive wife who loved being rich but hated having to work for it. So here's the thing i am going to be considerate to those reading and edit out the tour of 40 rooms of silverware, table cloths, plates and chamber pots for you. Unfortunately no one considered me before making me walk through 40 rooms of said items before anything remotely interesting happens. Whats the interesting thing Al? The gift shop located in the middle of the tour. What can you buy at the gift shop Al? Everything to do with a Royal Family that you have no ideas about because all that you've learnt is that have a 400 piece gold table setting that they don't use. So when does it get interesting? Well it doesn't. I don't mean to be rude to the Austrians but it seems to me they have this whole thing back to front. They have a museum dedicated to Emporer Franz Joseph (he doesn't have an affectionate name so i call him frankie) and his wife Emporess Elissabeth (sissi). She was an awful poet, i mean terrible, there are emo's outside flinders street station that write more interesting prose. (Note - She did write in german so it may lose something in the tranlation. Although it would have to lose a lot) She banged out a couple of kids out of duty (they´re royals, its expected) and then just wigged out. She was obbsessive about her weight and figure, spent 4 hours working out, used bizzare face creams to preserve her youth and banned people photographing her after her 30th birthday. So using my experience from Freud museum, I am going to hazard that she was insanely Vain and massively obbsessive. She refused to appear at public functions, infact just left her husband to do it all and she moved to an island in Greece. Her son topped himself, she wears all black (she may be the original emo), she insults her first grand child by calling it the ugliest child she's ever seen (or something like that). She had a boat built with a glass cage on top so she could sit in heavy storms and watch the water pour over the deck while the crew were down stairs (suicidal you think?). Spent shit loads of coin building houses around the world living in them for short periods then leaving never to return (ADD?). Meanwhile Frankie sits at home signing the cheques. So as far as i can tell she contributed nothing to Austria, yet once she was assasinated (by accident ... sort of) she became the peoples queen.... I know all this because there massive rooms dedicated to her. Frankie on the other hand gets stiffed. He was a pretty good guy I am assuming if he put up with Sissi's shit without complaing. I mean there was the world war he was involved with but aside from that blemish at the end he was a strong ruler who strenghthened Austria's position in Europe. The country was pretty rich under his rule and no one got out of hand.... But i don't know cos they don't tell you. They WASTE too much time on a woman that 100 years earlier they would have had killed. Ask Henry VIII, he would have just got a new wife. She was nuts. Bonkers. Loony. Not really that good.

Anyone some fun stuff.... Like all good monarchy's they have a summer palace.. It's massive, over blown, probably 700 more rooms than was actually required. Like all good summer palaces its miles away from their regular home, infact it takes a whole 15 minutes to walk from winter to summer palace. Once you have wiped the excess sarcasm off that last statement, it is a very nice place and it did have one of the highlights of Vienna, not for any artistic or cultural merits but for pure childish competition. It had a hedge maze. So Mel vs Al in the race to the centre. We had the maze cleared of all children (even though its probably there for them), loaded up on electrolytes and regretted not having a pasta meal the night before, stretched and finally tossed a coin to see who would enter going left and who would enter going right. At the starters pistol we were away. It's hard running in a maze when you cant see whose coming around the corner, we only ran into each other once and it was the most childish behaviour I've experienced since I've been 26. Had I been 25 still, i would have expected the holding, scratching, biting and name calling. So anyway i bet you're wondering who won... I did. I had some lunch, a cool drink and sent out for a pizza. After a while the guy who ran the maze asked if he could let the children back in, i told him yes. Then eventually Melissah made it to the centre.. If i had lost it would have been another shit thing in Vienna but i didn't!!!!

The maze


Completely lost ... Triumph ... at last!

Finally... This is just a note of pride for me really. I ordered 2 tickets to Krakow in german. Melissah left me (she speaks german by the way!!! not that she uses it!) to fend for myself (people don't understand my english let alone another language) against a nasty Austrian man who didn't speak english. So i tried to remember all the words in german i knew. When i got through all the swear words and he opened his booth back up i managed to use solitary words to get a ticket. Massive ups to me....

peace.