Monday 19 September: Vienna

A lovely sunny day in Vienna (how long can this weather last?) so we walked from the hotel down to the ringstrasse and past some of the palaces and museums. All the main sights are within a few minutes walk of each other, so it's very easy to get around. There are also lots of trams and an underground. The new trams are very smooth looking - quite futuristic.

We wandered through the main shopping streets, checked our email, and had a very nice morning coffee with strudel.

All the sightseeing and tours in Vienna seem to be run by a monopoly organisation called "Vienna Sightseeing". We went for a one-hour bus tour, which was really pretty poor. But we did find out the names of some of the buildings we'd been looking at. We were going to take a guided tour of the state opera house, but the size of the crowd turned us off.

On the way back to the hotel we noticed a bunch of soldiers on parade with a band playing. It was some sort of ceremony at the main palace complex, so we had a look at that and followed the parade through some adjacent streets.

In the evening we went for a "genuine Mozart evening". We were a bit cynical about this, expecting a poor meal and lacklustre musical performance. As it turned out, the meal was pretty good, if predictable (soup, schnitzel and strudel). The concert was at the golden salle of the Muzikaveren, one of the more famous concert halls in this city. We had front row seats - not the best for an orchestral concert, but it did give us a chance to see the musicians up close.

All the musicians wore period costume, and played a selection of Mozart pieces - overtures and single movements from symphony No 40 and Eine Kleine Nachtmuzik. They were interspersed with arias from Figaro and the magic Flute, sung by a particularly charismatic tenor and soprano. The musical highlight was a performance of the clarinet concerto (all three movements), played on a basset clarinet. We were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the performance. The encores were (again predictably) the Blue Banube waltz and Radesky march.

After the show we walked through the crisp Vienna evening back to our hotel.