The Vienna Institute runs two-week summer school courses every July, on philosophical and scientific topics. Duke generously supports anyone who wants to go, so I’ve had the pleasure of kicking around this fine city two summers in a row. Vienna highlights follow.

The best museums:

1. Kunsthistorisches, about the fourth largest art collection in the world; rooms of Rubens and Titian, and my favourite Vermeer. Plan to spend a whole afternoon.
   
2. Museum Moderner Kunst: Surrealism, Fluxus, Pop Art, and deeply strange Austrian performance art. George Brecht’s odd little conceptual events were a highlight for me.
   
3. The Leopoldmuseum, especially Klimt and Egon Schiele. I knew very little about Schiele before this and the gallery is cunningly set up so you pass through the abundant mediocrity of his contemporaries before getting the whole Egon experience. Also saw all of Goya’s engravings here.
   
4. The Federal Museum of Pathological Anatomy, an old lunatic asylum housed right in the university. Abnormal skeletons, latex casts of hideous skin ailments, models of the effects of tertiary syphilis...don’t go right before lunch.
   
5. The MAK: applied art and craft from the Wiener Werkstatt and thereabouts. Chairs, screens, cutlery, all beautifully designed.

Runner up is the Prunksaal, the old Imperial Library—everything not covered with books is covered with trompe l’oeil cherubs or gold leaf.

The cafés are The Thing to do in Vienna, but the well-known ones are tourist traps, while many of the others are actually not especially pleasant. One I stopped in was decorated in Early ’80s Gold and Vinyl, but as a consolation was playing “Auf Wiedersehen old Durham town” on the radio, which I took as a good omen.

Austrian food is not exactly light and varied, but they do some things well. Real Wiener schnitzel,  lovely yogurt (though the best yogurt I ever had in my life was in the Czech Republic soon after), and abundant great bread, with bakeries on every corner. The cuisine is somewhat meat-centred, though. An exercise in futility is randomly wandering about Vienna looking for a vegetarian restaurant—the joys of group dining. One surprise was the orange juice “Molke” I enjoyed with breakfast each day turned out to be based not on milk, but...whey. Oops. And avoid the Schweitzer Wurst-Salat, which is exactly what you would guess from the name: luncheon meat and swiss cheese with some bits of lettuce swimming in vinaigrette. Yum.

The Danube is actually fairly blue, if you visit a national park a little downriver, towards Bratislava. I even went swimming.

If anyone’s a fan of The Third Man, you can see it (in English) every week at the Burgkino, right on the Ring. And most of the locations it features are within walking distance, except for the Prater (of which more below). My other sublime movie experience was seeing the North Carolina film George Washington at the arthouse Stadtkino with German subtitles.

Vienna is statue city. In summer, when the inhabitants all seem to go on holiday, there are more statues than people (not counting tourists, of course). There are too many to fit on the ground; they line the rooftops in suicidal droves.

“I bring nice fish, mistress! Good Smeagol!”

California: the only US state to have its Governor’s footprints on display in a Viennese shopping mall.

With all the cafés and bakeries, you would think Starbucks and Subway would never get a foothold. Wrong. An Austrian explained to me that Starbucks is about the only place people don’t smoke, so you can take your kids there. Subway had the same gluey bread as in the USA, carefully made to inedible standards, but it had internet access and no doubt some American cachet.

The Naschsmarkt, already a great food market, has a bonus flea market on Saturday. All sorts of junk laid out for sale: silverware, leather shorts, hard-core porn. And a sad box of anonymous old photos, free for the taking.

I was good and learned some basic German beforehand, but was defeated by the simple act of buying stamps. Either my accent was really bad, or the postal service in Austria hires forgivingly. Essential Deutsch: Riesenvogel (giant bird), Flugunfähige (flightless), Ausgestorben (extinct). This is unfortunately no use for buying stamps.

The Naturhistorisches Museum, where I spent a few days measuring ratite bones, was a far cry from the modern art galleries. Hearkening back to the grand old days of Empire, the hallways were lined with every stuffed animal imaginable, all looking as musty and dusty as museums almost never look today. A nice moa bone collection though, all shipped over by Haast last century, no doubt in exchange for European antiquities.

Trappings of civilization: wonderous public transport, with seamlessly-connecting subways, trams, and buses; snazzy public bikes to rent for a few euros; open-air opera projected on the side of the Rathaus every night, where you could snack at many food stalls, grab a beer, and wander the park in twilight. All these humanistic touches are dwarfed by the grandiose architecture of the old city, built to a scale rather more than merely mortal.

The Belvedere was a whole separate palace built for Prince Eugene, Austria’s sole military hero (he was French), because he was a flamboyant homosexual and not fit for polite company.The lovely grounds are furnished almost entirely with pert-breasted sphinxes, Lord knows why.

Karlskirche, a stunning baroque church with two pseudo-Trajan columns and a mirroring pool in front for good measure.

Rigorous research has uncovered Austria’s Favorite Composer, as revealed by cellphone rings. The results:

•   Jupiter Symphony
•   Rondo alla Turca
•   March of the Toreadors
•   Jupiter Symphony (again)
•   Die Zauberflöte
•   Bach Badinerie

So the winner is (natürlich) Mozart. Really, who did you expect?

The ferris wheel scene in “The Third Man” takes place in the Prater, a 5-km-long park, with forest and walking trails at one end grading into a tacky amusement park at the other. The Riesenrad itself is disappointingly expensive and touristified now (though the views at night aren’t bad at all), but there are enough other hokey rides and junk food to dull the pain. Bumper cars with techno soundtracks, cheesy test-your-strengths, fried flatbread (an extraordinary calorie dump), the terrifying Mr Roboto (missing in 2004, sadly), and “scary” haunted houses with animatronic monks, like the spine-chilling Geister Schloß (I recommend traversing it with a beautiful Greek/Italian from Amsterdam, so you can clutch each other and scream like little girls).

A final few days at the end of the course in 2003 let me take a trip to Brno in the Czech Republic. Scary mummified monks in the Capuchin crypt, lifesize Shakira cutouts selling Pepsi, somewhat disappointing and over-developed caves, and a more eccentric taste in statuary than Vienna.

In 2004, I spent a few days in Budapest beforehand. Like Brno, very cheap, with great ice cream. The highlight was a statue park of remaindered Communist monuments, where you can take the requisite photos of yourself imitating gigantic heroic bronze workers.

Andy works it at the funfair.
He’s no girly-man, no sir.

The view from the Riesenrad.

What could be more terrifying than a giant animatronic blazing-eyed robot? One that laughs mockingly and slowly declaims stentorian threats at you. In German.