Our long overnight rail travel from Budapest to Bucharest is underway. The “Ister” leaves Budapest Keleti daily at 19:10 and arrives at Bucharest Nord at 11:38 the next morning. We left right on time, and I’m hopeful we’ll arrive at the other end right on time as well. We were booked, courtesy of the concierge at the Budapest Marriott, in a comfortable first-class sleeper that gives us ample space and a private WC with a shower. For it we paid 66,500 Hungarian Forints (HUF), or a little less than $350. All things considered, our eastern European sleeper is more comfortable than the German train from Paris to Munich.
Vienna and Budapest brought us many delights and new sights. We found ourselves so busy that I’ve not had time until now to post anything to the blog, but with a long ride ahead, now is a good time to catch up.
Vienna left a strongly favorable impression upon us, and I can imagine returning for an extended stay. We arrived just after two o’clock on Thursday morning. We took about an hour to get to our hotel, located on Schoenbrunn Schlossstrasse near the grand old imperial palace, its extensive grounds, and the oldest zoo in the world, begun as a menagerie kept by Her Imperial Majesty Maria Theresa.
After checking in we took the train back to the city center and spent time at two of Vienna’s churches, Karlskirche and St. Stephens. The former required a higher visitor’s fee than I wanted to pay, so we only looked around the outside of the church. 
Commissioned by Charles VI in honor of his namesake, St. Charles Borromeo, it has an impressively designed facade indeed. Though we didn’t see inside, in Karlsplatz we did haggle with a street artist for his ink pen drawings of two vantages of grand Viennese architecture, Karlskirche included.
At St. Stephen’s, we arrived just in time to attend Vespers. Not only did we have the welcome occasion to sit and pray, but we also gained access beyond the gawking tourists at the gates in the back of the church and saw the better part of the cathedral. To my regret, I was lost sooner in the service than I expected. I anticipated that some of the sung responses wouldn’t be printed and that we’d have to listen closely, make sense of what German we could, and follow to the best of our ability. When one of the first songs was in fact printed, I was encouraged. Thereafter, I couldn’t make the least sense of where in the service we were in relation to the printed program. Eventually I gave up following the program and simply listened. After the service, when we learned that the programs set out in our area were not for the service we attended, the depth of my confusion made sense. Never-minding my discombobulation, I enjoyed being in the beautiful cathedral church of Cardinal Schönborn, about whom I’ve heard many good things.
Avoiding the ubiquitous McDonalds and Burger Kings has not been an easy task, though we’ve been mostly successful. Still, Michele was not initially inclined to take Zachary to dinner at Wiener Wold until I pointed out the chicken on the bottom of the sign. We ended up with a quite pleasant and affordable family meal of roasted chicken and a dish somewhat akin to gnocchi. We’ll give a generous nod of the head to Wiener Wold.
Our Thursday evening included a walking tour that took in some of the environs of the Austrian Parliament and a trip to Prater Park to ride the Riesenrad, the enormous “Ferris wheel” constructed in 1897 in honor of the emperor’s golden jubilee, destroyed in WWII, and rebuilt by the Austrians in a show of renewed civic life after the war. The views of Vienna from its highest point were truly spectacular. Zachary reveled in the height and the sights, but he especially loved our little roller coaster ride afterwards on the “Dizzy Mouse.” The coaster cars, shaped like mice, scurry back and forth on the rails, descending to a grand finale that involves being swallowed whole by a giant wooden cat before the car returns to the queue. He’s scarcely stopped asking whether or not I like the dizzy mouse or the puddy cat better.
Friday morning gave us time to take the short tour of the imperial residence, Schönbrunn Palace, and walk around the inner circle of the zoo, both of which were enjoyable. The history of the palace and the Habsburg rule was, frankly, more interesting than the palace itself. But the zoo was the finest we’ve seen in terms of the quality of the exhibits. It’s well designed for visitors to see the animals from a wide variety of perspectives, and we saw more active behaviors exhibited than we recall elsewhere. Michele ranks it ahead of the San Diego zoo, a rather astounding approval of what began so long ago as a little more than a conversation piece in it’s days as the imperial menagerie.
From the zoo we had to make tracks to get back to the Marriott Courtyard for our bags, board the metro, and return to Wien Meidling for the train to Budapest. We had a 24-hour stopover booked, so when the RJ 63 train arrived at 2:07 from Munich, as it had the previous day when we disembarked, we simply boarded and took our same seats.
We’ve found the German cities we’ve visited to be charming. Our March days in Hamburg and Bremen were enjoyable. Though we had only a few hours of layover in Munich, its center city appeared full of the evidence of a vital civic, commercial, and ecclesial life. By our lights Vienna takes the charms of a Germanic people’s city to a new level. It has the lore of its history as an imperial capital along with its present stature as the capital city of Austria, yet it somehow retains the comfortable scale of a small, pedestrian friendly city. Public transportation is abundant, clean, efficient, and modern. City streets offer an exemplary model of mixed use zoning, with public, commercial, and residential spaces well allocated. The architecture all around conveys an eye for quality of design and construction; no slapdash cinderblock or sheet metal shacks here. Some of it is singularly awe inspiring, as for instance St. Stephen’s with its vertiginous single spire, one-of-a-kind roof design, and gothic piety.
St. Augustine makes a convincing argument in De Civitas Dei that there is no true commonwealth to be found in the earthly city, because a true commonwealth requires agreement about what is right and hence justice, which is only to be found perfectly in the rule of Christ. Thus, only in the city of God shall we find a people bound together such that goods are shared harmoniously and by the deliverances of justice. In the earthly city, guided as it is by a different faith, hope, and love, all manner of things tends to go awry. I don’t doubt any of it. Still, in some human communities more is amiss and in others more is admirable. Without taking our brief, unrepresentative sampling of Vienna as the whole, it nonetheless seems to provide an instance of the earthly city less diminished by the malaise common to man and less riven by the corrosive elements of late modernity than most I’ve seen.
Changing the terms of argument, were I a twenty-first-century Hamlet looking for a place to go in escape from something rotten in the state of Denmark or elsewhere, Vienna would offer a viable possibility. “The Murder of Gonzago,” the play within Shakespeare’s Hamlet, slurs Vienna for no good reason in making its villain Viennese. To the contrary of Shakespeare’s depreciation of Vienna, I say three cheers for the Viennese.
