Impression of Visiting Austria

 Thomas L.Jhonson

For a long time, Austria was never a destination but rather a sop on the way from somewhere or to somewhere. The scenario was usually something like this:

Having tired of the same old, same old in Munich, someone suggests an evening in Salzburg. As this was before the Euro made everything easier, you took the trip, changed some Marks into Schillings and enjoyed a quiet evening in some wonderful little hole-in-the-wall restaurant followed by a moonlight walk by the river with the lighted castle overhead. Enchanting but incomplete.

Then I discovered Zell am See, and Mittersill, and Bad Ischl, and the big guy, Vienna. Most Americans glomm onto Salzburg because it is cute and it means Mozart, and has horse-drawn carriages that can take you to places from the movie The Sound of Music.

Then you start looking for less touristy places and wind up in the Pinzgau Valley in a place like Mittersill. You meet some Austrians and find them to be good people, hard working, honest. They speak their dialect and you speak Hochdeutsch and they understand while you pretend you do them too.

Eventually, you find yourself visiting and then staying in places like Bad Ischl and Zell am See that are so remarkable in their natural settings and delightful in their presentation and skiing and restaurants that you find yourself hoping the Rick Steves never discovers them to unleash the hordes of one night tourists that can decimate a place.

But Vienna is that remarkable place that is too big for the little country Austria became once the empire dissolved a century ago, where there is a dynamic yet slow-paced major city with all of the advantages a big city offers: museums full of Schiele and Klimt, the opera with its standing places, the Naschmarkt with its little restaurants, Hundertwasser, and the greatest Christmas Market this side of Nuremberg.

Eventually, Austria becomes a favored destination and you realize that you are now spending weeks and even months where you though a stopover was sufficient to say you had visited Austria.