Vienna Day 5. Stroller in Old Town

We met our travel companions for breakfast. I'd arranged yesterday to join Bernard for a visit to a house where Beethoven lived for a while and where he wrote several of his most famous compositions. The other two were more interested in doing some shopping, so we parted ways after eating, which we did in Aida café, on the corner of Griechengasse, one of the oldest streets in Vienna. The weather had taken a turn for the worse, and it was quite chilly and breezy, with a bit of rain thrown in for good measure. Still, it wasn't bad enough to discourage us from exploring part of the old town before paying our respects to the great composer. The blip shows music-group member Bernard strolling ahead of me along Griechengasse.

The Beethoven House closes between 1.00 and 2.00, so we cut short our mini tour to get there before it closed. It was good to see the place, but disappointing to find out that the apartment which is now a museum wasn't the actual apartment where Beethoven lived (his was the one on the far side of the stairs on the same floor). Also, most of the material on display was in facsimile rather than original. All in all, more than a little bit disappointing.

We'd agreed a time and a place for the four of us to meet up again, by which time we were all ready for lunch. Carl and I led our little group back to the place we'd been to on Sunday with our Budapest friends, a cheap-and-cheerful sort of pub-grub establishment which offered reasonable fare at more than reasonable prices. After lunch we stopped off at the other two's apartment for coffee, after which we parted company again and Carl and I hopped on the Ring Tram for a tour of some of the city's main attractions. Rather than stay on board for a complete circuit we opted to get a hope-on-and-off ticket. We very quickly found out that there was no real need to do this, since the ring road is actually quite short, and the 30-minute intervals between trams made it difficult to see much at any one spot without either rushing or waiting aimlessly for the tram to come round again. Still, we saw a bit more of the city and soaked up more of the atmosphere.

Being our last day, we thought it only fair to spend some more time together as a group rather than leave it till tomorrow morning to meet again at the airport, so we made a mad dash back to the same place we'd begun the day at. The restaurant we planed on going to didn't take our fancy when we checked the menu, and it took us a while to find an alternative place which took our fancy. As it happened, we would have been better off sticking to our original guns. Where we opted for looked nice, and the menu was attractive, but the service proved to be really bad, and desperately slow. With no sign of our main course after a very long interval, we had to call the owner over to complain. He went into a long rigmarole about being short-staffed and having more customers than he could cope with, but we made it clear that we were far from happy. His compensation gesture when it came time to pay was original. We'd said we'd be happy not to have to pay for our starters, but he went one better and deducted an amount from the total bill equal in euro to the number of minutes we'd had to wait for our main course, which proved to be a better deal.

Having spent much longer over our meal than we'd originally planned, Carl and I were much later going our separate way. We tried a bar in the Old Town but didn't like the feel of the place, even though prices were ridiculously cheap. Then we had a brainwave and decided to move on to a spot we'd noticed while we waited for the other two to show up for breakfast. This is a fabulously-designed place, very modern, which overhangs the banks of the Danube Canal. It has café, restaurant and bar spread over three levels. Having already eaten, we aimed for the bar. It was the perfect place to spend our last night, especially since the cocktail menu was reasonably priced and highly inventive. We got talking to the cocktail waiter and asked him to do something special for us, which he did. One more cocktail after those and we were ready to call it a night.