Vienna: Sweat the Small Stuff

Vienna is host to a veritable buffet of historic buildings, famous musicians, pedestrian strands, and knockout views. Sure, I like that stuff (obviously, from my last half dozen Vienna posts). But there is more to Vienna than the Staatsoper and Schonbrunn palace. Tapping across the cobblestones early in the morning with hearty tights-clad runners, watching a horse and carriage vie for position in the street with a bus, cracking open a chestnut and offering the paper cone to my husband at the same moment as the older woman in front of me proferred her cone to her husband, these details are just as memorable as the chocolate santa display shining in Julius Meinl's and the dozens of statues of men on horses littering the city. I will remember city workers hanging Christmas lights above H & M and Zara, gargoyles stabbing out into the air beneath glitzy church towers, strangely artistic graffiti on an electrical box.

Like so many cities we have visited this year, Vienna was laden with beauty. But sometimes there is more to a city than its beauty - there is the life, the hum beneath the aesthetic.