after living in this beautiful city for over a month, i hardly know where to start! i've been making a mental list of just some of the things i love about vienna though...
1. you can drink the tap water, no filter needed. i can't tell you how happy this makes me, though admittedly i'll drink tap water anywhere, even in morocco (though there were times i swore i never would again). the tap water here is piped down from the alps and only has a tad bit of preservative chemicals (added only, in fact, because of and during the American occupation after WWII) that are supposed to keep it cleaner.
2. the public transport is clean and wonderfully easy to use. for 50 euros a month, you can ride anywhere in the city limits by bus, subway, train or streetcar. however, as the weather turns warmer (it was a balmy 50 degrees today. i'm very excited about this.), i'm going start walking everywhere instead (it's about 30 minutes to the city center from our house in the 19th district) and put the money saved into going to budapest and bratislava, both short distances away. which brings me to
3. vienna is so close to so many places! we've already been on group trips to munich and prague, and i'm planning several trips of my own to budapest, bratislava, salzburg, and even barcelona (found cheap tickets on ryanair.com). next week i'll be spending spring break in florence and rome with my parents (making italian my unofficial 5th language of study)!
4. vienna is very clean and there's not as much smoking in public as i thought there might be, which is nice. then again, my last trip was to morocco where i was surrounded by nicotine junkies. nonetheless, they do a good job of keeping things tidy and swept around the city (and unlike moscow, no packs of feral dogs roaming the streets. wunderbar!)
5. it's quite a cosmopolitan city, and people speak all sorts of languages and hail from all different parts of the world. the lingua franca is definitely english, and i've been enjoying seeing illustrations from what we've studied in my linguistics classes in daily conversations. i enjoy speaking german while out, but i'm also comforted by the fact that if i need to, i can communicate in english.
6. there are plenty of things to do for a few euros (or less) here. the stadtpark is a huge woodsy park in the first district, but there are many more smaller (but still span several square blocks) parks scattered about the city. turkenschanz park is just a block from our house, and offers running trails, sledding hills, beautiful views and even a little restaurant that may be nice to visit as the weather warms up. you can also get standing room seats to an opera or a concert for a few euros; monday night we went to see falstaff by verdi and it was wonderful. they even have little screens where you can read the words in german or in english!
7. cafe culture is also wonderful, and you can linger over a cup of coffee in a kaffeehaus in vienna without getting hurried out by your server.
8. every day, i find another thing to love about vienna! especially as the warmer weather approaches... for the first couple weeks, the temperatures never went above freezing!
