Viennese Cake, Flying Saucers, and Catacombs [written Thursday, January 12]

It’s absolutely beautiful in Vienna. The sun is shining across my paper as I’m sitting in front of the St. Stephens Cathedral nibbling at my Demel Cleopatretort cake made with raspberry jam. The weather is chilly, my cake is classy, and writing away on the cold granite bench as busy tourists and blue-blood natives scurry by with their ritzy-store shopping bags is making me feel quite cultured. I’m waiting for our tour of the St. Stephens Cathedral and its catacombs. The word ‘catacombs’ makes Edgar Allen Poe and The Cask of Amontillado come to mind. I’m hoping the catacombs will be Poe-style—cold, damp, and creepy. If I were on the St. Stephens Cathedral Catacombs Preservation Committee, I’d also recommend leaving a few old bones here and there to give tourists the full effect.

Today morning, we had an extensive tour of the city. It’s winding, narrow streets and the wall of buildings that line them remind me of Berlin and Bonn and all the German cities we’ve visited, but it’s somehow closer here, older, maybe. We snuck through a shopping mall to get a spectacular view of the St. Stephens Cathedral from about nine floors up. From here, one side of the Cathedral’s tiled mosaic roof with its double-headed eagle, symbolic of the past rulers of Austria was very easy to see. After the tour and lunch, we walked around Stephansplatz, stopping to listen to a guy playing a “Hang,” a round metal instrument that looks something like the stereotypical UFO flying disk with evenly spaced dents along the side, and walking through a German bookstore, which seemed rather small at first but then, after stumbling up one staircase and then the next that went both up and below the ground, it was evident that its book collection was probably more extensive than the average Barnes and Nobles’. We then found our way to Demel’s chocolate shop where I bought a case of marmalade for home and my wonderful slice of Cleopatretort cake. (It tastes divine, by the way.) The group has gathered. To the catacombs!