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Vienna, ah what a place. It is the one city on Earth where you can find someone who thinks its the best place to live on Earth, while ignoring the fact that th
by fit2rule 6y ago
Vienna, ah what a place. It is the one city on Earth where you can find someone who thinks its the best place to live on Earth, while ignoring the fact that the city was built up to house hundreds of thousands of poor, giving them naught but a thin strip of blue sky, if any at all.
It is, literally, a concrete jungle - but prefers to describe itself as a city of gardens and parks.
It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum you profess to hold, whether you are leftist or right-wing, you will ALWAYS receive the ire of its citizens if you criticise Vienna for being an inhuman, desperate city. And yet, in many ways, it really is a desperate place, full of yearning and misery. You only have to take a walk down one of the many, many gasse (roads) where only a bare ribbon of sky is exposed, and hear for yourself the lamentations of its citizens. The Viennese are not friendly, and never will be, as theirs is the culture of duplicity refined. But of course, tourists looking for Beethoven and Mozart won't notice, because Vienna is very good at distracting the visitor from its ugly core.
It is not a friendly place, either - well except maybe for a few weeks in early Spring, as things thaw out and the winters piles of dogshit melt.. I've lived here for 12 years, and type this from a villa looking out over Turkenschanzpark, which is one of the places considered so valuable to the citizens who believe it is the greenest city in the world. Its true, once you're in the park, its easy to forget the hell that surrounds it.
Of course, if I'd been born here, I wouldn't see all of this in such a dark light. But as I was born in a state where the wide open sky is not a privilege but rather a right, I find the Viennese love of their prison quaint and irregular.
- no1name 6y agoCan you name a city you are fond of? Just so that we can contrast it with Vienna.
- fractallyte 6y agoDon't forget that other beautiful green space, that oasis of tranquility: Augarten! Such orderly networks of paths, passing through tree lined groves, and occasional plots of wild growth to distract one from the careful arrangement of nature... And, towering over everything - dominating one's vision - two monstrous flak towers („Flakturm“) constructed by the Nazis in the early 1940s. And I do mean monstrous: huge gray concrete structures that rear up into the sky. Hell is in the park too.
- jariel 6y agoVienna has the same population density as Montreal and Toronto (~4500/km2), and somewhat lower than Denver, not exactly known for their attempts to cram the poor into tiny spaces. Having been there only briefly, trying to fathom what I had somehow 'completely missed' given your comments ...
- fit2rule 6y agoYou visited. I have lived. It takes the changing of the seasons and the winter gloom to understand why Vienna is structurally an oppressive place. The caves people live in, the mind-numbing streets they use to get to them, the sameness of it all under a dull grey. The hacks that have made it liveable are exposed by the weather, eventually, and you will see it, the inhumanity.
- jariel 6y agoHaving lived all over the world which provides me with some basis of reference, I reject this characterisation of Vienna based on architectural structure. There is absolutely nothing oppressive about the physicality of Vienna, it doesn't take more than a couple of days of being there for this to be self evident. Now - you can say something about the culture of Vienna, that the people are this or that, fundamentally different than elsewhere, but from your very emotional and personal comments, even I would doubt that. I suggest this is an issue with the observer, not the observed.
- fit2rule 6y agoCouldn't disagree with you more. The architecture of Vienna is designed to pack people on top of each other, giving each domicile the bare minimum air and light required. It is truly oppressive to experience, year after year. The Viennese live in caves.