(a suit and tie is perfectly fine for the Staatsoper as a tourist, btw)
So ... Wien. As a local band has sung with tongue firmly in cheek "
You are the last Emperor - not a city, you're actually a museum". And it's very easy to come here, see the palaces (there's a bunch of them), visit the museums (there's a bunch of them), go to the opera (there's several), see the horses at the Spanish Riding School (they are beautiful), and basically just see a living museum of the pinnacle of the late 19th century. That's a cool visit, it really is. There's tons of guidebooks and internet sites to help you pick out what parts of the living museum you want to see - there's so much, just go with whatever strikes your fancy, you won't go wrong. Even the touristy trappiest of tourist traps in Vienna are good.
But that isn't Wien, and probably never was. A local Viennese once described the city to me as a bunch of coffee houses bordered by the river on one side and hills on the other, and that's probably as good a place as any to start with what to see here. This is a city that adores it's outdoors culture and treats it's coffee houses as communal living rooms that are sacred places where everyone is equal, at least for a few hours. Life is kind of lived in between one of those two places. Visiting in the summer time in particular, try to not get too trapped into just palaces and museums and spend as much time as possible in the parks, on the river, in the hills or in a coffee house.
A few things I highly recommend that aren't going to a museum or a palace:
#1 - Go up to the top of
Kahlenberg, see the city spread out below and then hike down through the vineyards - stopping to drink in the various "Heuriger" (basically, wine huts). This isn't Napa, there's nothing fancy about it. You get a jug of wine, a jug of sparkling water, maybe a plate of cold cuts and cheese and everyone hangs out on the grass. As you hike down the Kahlenbergerstrasse you'll end the afternoon/evening in the area of Grinzing, have dinner in of the various more (very slightly) formal wine gardens there. Snobbier Viennese locals will turn their nose up a bit at going to Heuriger in Grinzing because it's where tourists go (to some extent) ... but that's also because it's incredibly picturesque and accessible.
And by the way, while you are headed up to Kahlenberg in the morning - make sure to stop and spend a few minutes at
Karl Marx-Hof which is one of the largest and longest social housing building complexes in the world, and a good reminder of just how "red" Vienna is and has been historically and is an icon of the social housing program that is the backbone of Vienna (40% of the population lives in some form of social housing or subsidized housing). The Guardian recently listed it as one of their 50 buildings that told of the stories of cities globally and had a great write up on it's history and symbolism for Vienna (
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...politics-ideology-history-cities-50-buildings ).
#2 Spend time on the Danube. There's a few ways of doing this, but my favorite is to rent a small electric boat (they are cheap -
at places near the Donauinsel U-Bahn stop or on the Alte Donau) and cruise up and down. Feel free to bring snacks, drinks (public drinking is encouraged, not discouraged - just don't do it while behind the wheel of the boat), pull over wherever you want along the shore and even swim in the river. There's also various restaurants and bars along the shore that cater to the crowd in and around the water, so pop out and then back in. Be aware that several parts of the Donauinsel and Alte Donau are FKK (free body culture) areas ... so if you're on a boat and cruise past one of those, you're going to see some naked Viennese. Nobody gives a shit, you probably shouldn't either.
You can also go to one of the giant parks that line the river. Prater is the oldest and most famous, and the Donauinsel is where most of the active (cycling, running, etc) stuff happens. These are huge parks, with various bars and cafes in them to quench your thirst after you've been doing whatever it is you do to keep yourself active (or just sitting on a blanket in the sun). On any sunny day these will be PACKED.
#3 Be young and hip for a night. Spend the late afternoon and early evening in the various seasonal bars and huts that line the Donaukanal through the center of the city. Check out the graffiti and public art (the walls of the Kanal are given over to street artists) and dangle your feet off the edges over the water and talk about serious things (or just stare at the city center and make out, whatever) while drinking a few Aperolspritzer or cold beers.
Move on over to the
MuseumsQuartier as the sun goes down, to hang in the courtyard of gorgeous 19th century imperial buildings which have now been turned over to the youths to seemingly do what they want. Various bars are around the edges but BYOB is the law of the land for the youngsters who fill the place on the weekends (one of the most famous art museums in Vienna - the Leopold, which is truly excellent - turns into a packed nightclub later on the weekends). Drink a few more beers as the stars come out, lay on a giant goofy plastic bench/seat thing, maybe grab some dinner and people watch.
By midnight or so, time for some music. You can slide around the back exit of MQ to an infamous club called Donau - the walls are covered in projected visual art of all sorts of wierdness, and the music is some indescribable something that's definitely newer and cooler than you are supposed to know. There's a sausage stand inside the club (even has vegan sausages, blech) and the smoking zones are repurposed ski gondolas. It's that kind of place ... basically, if you designed the stereotypical "too cool for everyone to really know what the hell is going on" European nightclub, it'd be Donau. Somehow it's actually good though. Don't ask me how that is.
#4 Spend at least an entire afternoon in a coffee house. These are the living rooms of the city, institutions so ingrained into city life that it's impossible to imagine a Vienna that doesn't have it's coffee houses. They are some combination of open work place, discussion hall, dive bar and diner all wrapped into one and each has it's own rhythm and feeling. There's literally hundreds upon hundreds in the city, and people have STRONG FEELINGS on which is better than another. I would say that while the oldest and most famous ones (Central, Landtmann, Havelka, Demel and the one inside the Hotel Sacher) are beautiful, the large of number of tourists does hamper the vibe in them to some extent. A few of my favorites are here, but honestly - just pick one slightly away from the dead center tourist area, bring some reading material or a sketch book or whatever, and go and sit and spend ... some amount of time. Just hang. It's the most Viennese thing you can do.
Cafe Prückel
Cafe Alt Wien
Cafe Hummel
Cafe Sperl
This is either the most eastern "western" city or the most western "eastern" city and one of the oldest truly multicultural cities in the world. You will hear 10 languages minimum on any regular day in the U-Bahn, and the wild mix of ethnicities and backgrounds has always fueled a very diverse and varied cultural scene that has always made the city stand out among major European capitals. Wien isn't Austrian, it isn't German, it's just ... Wienerisch. There's a specific kind of "cool" that the city has (the
Wiener Schmäh) - a sort of aloof, roguish charm that in a lot of ways is a knowing wink at the history and ridiculousness of life here among the museum pieces, along with an arrogance of the quality of life and culture (there's a sign in the MuseumsQuartier that captures this perfectly - it just says "Wien hat Kultur." / Vienna has culture. ... the period at the end is a perfect amount of arrogance).
The best thing about Vienna is that life isn't forced to be fast here, and as a tourist it's so hard to get that feeling because you are rushing from one site to another. You can do that, it's great. But it'll miss the essence of the city.
