Scenes of Vienna

I was sitting on the tram at Westbahnhof waiting for it to leave, when I looked at the departure time screen and realized I would be sitting there for 20 minutes unless I wanted to walk ... some sort of delay or other.

Bored with Sudoku on my cell phone, I looked out the window. Standing outside the Tabak, dressed in U.S. Army garb and smoking a cigarette was a man moonwalking. 

Living in London, the Viennese Kaffeehaus is one of the things I miss the most. There’s nothing quite like it, with its perfect balance of cosiness and space that creates a bubble of privacy in a public setting. Unfortunately quiet moments like that simply don’t exist in this vast and busy metropolis.

I was just thinking what a boring sod I was becoming, girlfriend, work, colleagues, that sort of thing, when “Something spectacular is coming to Vienna” landed in my inbox. It was a “VIP” invitation to the newest club in town. The place was called “Alpha”: the daring candour admirable, I thought at the time, in admitting such a commonplace pretension.

“But we’re on the VIP list,” the girl protested, the black points of her eyes locked accusingly onto the doorman through the night.

Austrian cinema is best known internationally for the directors, rather, than the films, it has fostered. Men like Alexander Korda, Michael Curtiz, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder all hailed from the Austro-Hungarian Empire – but politics meant they found fame elsewhere.

U.S. citizens living abroad are required to file income tax returns. The United States is in fact the only industrialized country in the world that taxes its citizens’ income overseas. Now, in hopes of upping federal tax revenue, the IRS is heightening controls abroad.

Americans working abroad have long been protected, at least to some extent, by the  Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE), under which those who earn less than $92,900 (in 2011) are not required to pay income tax on their foreign-earned income. 

The doors of Vienna conceal many pleasant surprises: a Baroque courtyard, a fountain or a Renaissance arcade. Others, like those at Salztorgasse 6, reveal a history of nightmare, one that takes time to tell, and sometimes even longer to set in stone.

Vienna’s annual Fashion Week has grown – and grown up. In its third year running, the event has been extended from three to five days and  this year showed 50 designers from Sept. 14 to 18. 

The crowds filing into the tent outside the MuseumsQuartier were a colorful mix of fashion professionals, budding young designers, Austrian celebrities and ‘bohos’ of all sorts. Anyone can buy a ticket to Vienna Fashion Week, unlike other cities, where it’s invitation only. 

Vienna on a summer evening: Michelle, a Canadian scientist, and her Austrian husband Oskar were meeting some American friends on a one-night stopover of a Danube river cruise. Michelle and Oskar had arranged to meet them in the lobby of the Hilton am Stadtpark. They arrived to find their friends waiting with a sumptuous bouquet of flowers for their hostess.

“It was one of those glorious, colourful masterpieces with sunflowers, roses, and more, wrapped in a bright crepe paper ‘Manschette’ holding them together, the way they do so well in the Viennese flower shops,” she said, still glowing.

The Jodok Fink Platz is an unlikely place to start a revolution. At the heart of the conservative 8th District, the square bears the name of an interwar politician renowned for his compromise-building.