How best to spend a cold, winters day...

than with a little photo tour from the "hottest" trip I took last year, Lucerne and Venice...

Vienna Roundup

We have just returned from a lovely New Year's trip to Vienna with my parents.  Ever since they booked their trip for xmas it had been decided that we would live one of my life-long dreams of visiting the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, so it was our trip was born.


We arrived mid-morning, and as our room at the Konzerthaus Hotel wasn't yet ready, we set off on foot to explore the city.  We walked along one of the main shopping streets, stopped to  admire Stephansdom, ate a delicious lunch of viennese sausages and walked a loop around to Hofburg Palace and Museum Quarter - stopping to admire the Mozart Memorial along the way back to the hotel.


We discovered the amazing and wonderful Gmoa Keller, a traditional Viennese Inn, right near our hotel where we feasted on Weiner Schnitzels and Cordon Bleu - and Ben was blown away by his vegetarian dishes.  If you are ever in Vienna, I would highly recommend making the trip to eat here!


Day 2 saw us venture to the Riesenrad - the ferris wheel made famous from the old-school movie The Third Man.  I quite like getting up high in a new city to get a good sense of direction and as Vienna doesn't have many tall buildings you get a really nice view over the whole city (whilst also freaking out about how windy it is up there!).  We then had a hot date with a Sacher Torte at Cafe Demel - made famous for being the original maker of the Sacher (although this is highly debated, with Hotel Sacher also claiming this fame).  Of course, we had to try both just to see for ourselves - I highly recommend trying the "mini" tortes - it was a close call for me - the Demel mini had a lovely tingly coating of apricot jam between the cake and ganache, whereas the Hotel Sacher variety had an extra layer of jam in the middle which was just as divine.


Then finally, the night had arrived - the Spanish Riding School performance. There aren't really words to describe how beautiful this was - the horses are magnificent and talented and the venue gorgeous - it truly is an amazing tradition that has been carried on since 1745!!!  We followed with dinner (i.e. more schnitzel's :) at Cafe Griensteidl opposite the School, and another meal that didn't disappoint!


New Years Eve started with swooning over the largest collection of Gustav Klimt at the Belvedere, watching Ben get his skate on at the massive ice skating rink near our hotel (about 4 times bigger than any in London!) and our final trip to Hotel Sacher.  By that stage, the streets were getting quite busy with revellers, so we headed back for, yep you guessed it, more schnitzel - this time at the hotel restaurant!  After dinner, Ben and I headed out to join the street party and were amazed at how civilised everyone was, even though there was a large amount of alcohol being consumed - that certainly wouldn't happen in Australia!  


So now we are home, back in rainy London and as I type this, the New Year Concert is being shown on BBC Four and we have just witnessed ballet dancers in the Klimt room of the Belvedere, not only dancing in front of "The Kiss", but recreating it - we are all very excited to claim that we were there just yesterday, and saw all of the equipment being set up - how cool to be able to see the "other end" of all of that - I personally find it all very fascinating!!!!

The Long Table

There's been a lot of hype about The Long Table since the massive queues spread word like wild-fire that this is THE place to be on a Friday night in London.  The Street Food craze is just starting to take off in London and The Long Table is nurturing the concept in the best of ways.  Held in a disused parking lot up in the "Hipster" north of London, some of the coolest/tastiest vendors have joined together to create this awesome hang-out.  Live music (including funky strings), local beers and cocktails (with bubbles!), big open bonfires to keep everyone warm and last but not least, Long Tables to sit at to soak it all in.

I'd read that we need to be there by 6.30pm if we had any chance of getting in without queueing - we arrived at 6.20pm and turns out we were a bit late, the queue was already snaking down the lane and around the corner.  Turns out it opened a bit late, so once we moved, we were in pretty quickly.  (However, I can't say the same for the even longer queue that was still there when we left 2 hours later!)

We walked straight into the queue (yes, there's still lots of queueing once inside), for a Yum Bun - a steamed bun stuffed with pork belly, cucumber and hoisin (a cross between duck pancakes and pork buns), and vegetarian option for Ben using mushroom.  We both agreed these were amazing and almost walked straight back to the end of the queue for seconds.

BUT we forced ourselves to keep exploring - we munched on Caribbean vegetable pancakes (OMG, the surprise of the night, tasted a bit like a flat spring roll - delish!), Shoo Foo Doh (japanese pancake), Meatballs from my beloved The Bowler (who's hopefully going to grace us with a vegetarian option in 2012!), and finished off with a slice of fresh-out-of-the-portable-wood-oven Pizza slice.

Honestly, I could have stayed all night, but my stomach was begging otherwise and we had friends to meet, so we reluctantly left the cool kids to their evening and left hoping with all hope that The Long Table becomes a permanent event long after it's expected xmas final date.

ps - please excuse the terribly grainy, night-time, iPhone photo's...