The Way 'Wien' Were

Highlights from a winter week in Vienna

The Mozart Monument (Mozart-Denkmal) in the Burggarten, Vienna, Austria.

Sorry, I am pathologically addicted to bad plays on words—including combining words in two languages that probably should not be. Thus, the title of this (very overdue) update.

Wien, if you did not know, is what Vienna is called in German.

And, try as I might, I cannot seem to write short travelogues. I always end up writing book chapters of everything I did, plus everything I wanted to do but ran out of time for—and then more about all of it than anyone really wants to read.

Capturing Vienna is particularly challenging. As the former seat of the Habsburg monarchy, then capital of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city has been a center of art, architecture, music and culture for hundreds of years.

We were there for five days in February and I could have stayed a month and still barely scratched the surface of everything I wanted to see.

In the interest of brevity—and email size limits—I’m breaking this trav…