I've just come back from meeting Mum in Vienna. It was truly a lovely break - intellectually refreshing and stimulating. Concerts and theatre (a very provocative if flawed Jelinek play about the western reception and fetishisation of the Iraq war), cafes and novels, op shops and modern art (the Museumsquartier - MUMOK!).


When I first went to Vienna, my german was a shambling mess, the city was bereft of student life but there was the excitement of a dormant, waiting metropolis there.

I felt that this time, I was able to engage with a living city tense in its own contradictions. The dizzy pomp and elegance of its past head on with a vital student, artistic community. In contrast to Berlin, Vienna appears a city where the hip and modern, is no buried underground thing to be sifted out, but rather institutionalised and woven into the very fabric of the place.