As we had criss-crossed our way around the city on Friday we headed down to the Danube canal mid-Saturday morning stopping in a bakery for some late breakfast (topfenstrudel which is a kind of yogurt cream wrapped in strudel pastry – I mean if you can’t have cake for breakfast on holiday when else …). Which was delicious but was accompanied two poor coffees (why do I never listen to my own advice about bakeries and their coffee). A trip to Starbucks later for a double shot grande something or other our minds had cleared a little (the icy wind outside might have helped) and we were strolling along the canal banks admiring the crazily bright graffiti and arguing whether the statues in the picture above were made from wood or stone (twins don’t agree on everything).
From there we continued across the canal to the park at Prater with its Ferris wheel (and own Christmas market) where we spent a nice twenty minutes squealing over a cute squirrel eating away in a little tree-hut and the birds attempts to sneak some food.
One of the other blogs I enjoy reading is wandertowonder, and since she had been to Vienna before we took her advice and stopped into the Tian bistro for lunch, a quirky unusual art-deco vegetarian cafe. The Hugo could have tasted a little more of Elderflower, but my sisters flan was dripping with cheese (that’s a sprig of thyme stuck into the middle) and my potato-dumplings filled with carrot-pumpkin spiced something with a mushroom sauce disappeared into my stomach in the space of two seconds. Delicious food at affordable prices, meaning I can only imagine what their actual full restaurants are like (but there’s one in Munich so its time to start saving my money). The real knockout was the dessert of which I may or may not have ordered two and pretended that my sister (who may or may not have been full) was prepared to eat dessert (she had a spoonful or two). The passionfruit cheesecake looked gorgeous but could have been a little more zingy, the chocolate mousse/tart/cake/Idontknowwhatitwas was to die for.
To walk off the after-lunch slovenliness we followed another side canal over to the city park, took a slightly circuitous route found a Christmas market and decided to have a pre-emptive gluhwein due to the cute mugs, and made it back to our apartment for another nap before we began our Christmas market crawl, which deserves another post entirely to itself.