We just spent two weeks in Vienna, Austria (and environs), here are some impressions of mine as a tourist:
Overall, it's a very nice city to visit. Public transit is exceptional, we used it a lot. It's on the honor system, no gates, we were checked once for our tickets (we bought week passes). The food overall was ... "OK", our best meal was lunch at an Italian place, which was indeed quite good. Viener Schnitzle is basically thin fried chicken or pork, usually too dry IMHO.
It seems like a larger city than 2.2 million in population. It's on the Danube, our hotel was overlooking the river. Across the river was some high rise construction, the middle of the city is more like Paris, but there was quite a bit of destruction as the Soviets came through in 1945. They were holding Eurovision our last few days which meant more folks around and about.
We toured the Parliament building which is quite nice, recently redone. They put a LOT of emphasis on "diversity". One hears about Muslims of course, but that area of Europe is historically divided into multiple different ethnicities, religions, nationalities, etc. We met Slovaks and Ukrainians at the hotel and managed to have some fairly long conversations with them at times. We went on several tours, one food tour was very good and took us into a Muslim dominated market (and area), among other places. Outside that, Muslims were not very prevalent.
We also did a wine tour that got us out in the countryside, the wines were decent. They have some we don't find much here, in addition to their "national wine", gruner veltliner.
We took two long all day tours to see Hallstat (pretty but very touristy) and Salzburg (also pretty, historic, we chatted about going back, but again many tourists). The other tour went to Budapest and Bratislava, national capitals of Hungary and Slovakia. Both were worth seeing, even briefly. The latter is very close to Vienna.
Vienna has many museums, we toured a few, and palaces from the Hapsburg era. My wife was not overly impressed with Schonbrun palace. Museums were so large as to be overwhelming, interesting in spots. The Albertina Museum was very nice, my wife liked it a lot (art mostly).
We attended two concerts, one in the famous Musikverein, which was disappointing to me after a lot of buildup. I could barely sit down and my legs were cramping so we left at intermission. The other was our last night at Palais Auersperg, it was awesome. They had a lady singer who did some famous parts from various operas that were really something, and the rest was quite good as well, a lot of Mozart and Strauss father and son.
There is a large oil refinery south of the city between it and the airport, Vienna tries to "pretend" to be ecoconscious, of course, and there were a ton of wind turbines out in the country, many of which were actually turning. Hungary had a lot of flat plains and agriculture also with turbines, Solvakia had zero. Gasoline was about 2 Euro per liter, close to $8/gallon.
We were walking 5-6 miles most days, using the subway extensively, and the trams at times. The weather was wonderful for all but Day one and the last day when it was pretty chilly (it was 36°F our first morning), and the penultimate day when we got caught in an unexpected thunderstorm. I got pretty wet. (If Atlanta had a subway like theirs, well .... we don't. We have freeways (usually parking lots). Their subway cars were a bit plain, but functional. There were even more trams or streetcars going everywhere with more under construction.
My wife had some mixed opinions about it but overall really enjoyed the trip. The second concert was fabulous and our tour of Budapest and Bratislava was a small group tour with an excellent guide.
A couple wrinkles on air travel, we booked through CDG then to Vienna and for whatever reason the French had in place some pretty draconian security checks. We had to rush to make our connection. We came back through Amsterdam and then NYC, I think it saved a few bucks. I managed to get into what is called "premium" for the Atlantic flights, I fear I'm becoming a bit spoiled by that over Comfort. I had not experienced JFK airport before and hope not to again. Schipol is OK. Vienna's airport is quite nicely done. Folks like to rag on ATL but it's well laid out for changing planes. We stayed the entire time in one hotel which worked out as it is 0.3 km from a subway line and has a very nice exec lounge.
As for "going back", we chatted about doing maybe 3 days in Vienna again sometime and seeing more of the broader area. Driving a rental car looked very feasible, to me, except in Hungary the road signs were .... different. I wouldn't mind driving in the Alps a bit if we had a decent rental.
