Das Beste!

'I’m only speaking German to impress my wife,' my husband tells the taxi driver, in German, on the way into Vienna from the airport. 

'That's very impressive,' I say, in English.

At the hotel, the guy behind the reception desk says, 'This is the best room in the hotel,' also in English, as he hands us a key card. 

After inspecting the best room in the hotel, I turn to my husband and say, 'There’s no bath,' (I do love a bath), then I watch my husband's eyebrows shoot up. 'Aber das ist das beste zimmer des hotels!' my husband says.

We look at another room that has a bath, but it's not nearly so nice as the best room so we stay in the best room. 'Why do we always have to have a thing about rooms?' my husband says, 'and tables in restaurants?' 

'Because I like das beste,' I tell him.

In the morning, from the shower, I shout: 'Sod the bath! This is das beste shower I ever had!' and my husband's eyebrows shoot up again (I don’t actually see this because I’m in the shower, but I know that they do).

Fruit and nut case.

At breakfast, the muesli comes with ten different types of seed and dried fruit. 'This is das beste breakfast I ever had in a hotel!' I tell my husband. 'I need your phone.'

'Why?' he asks.

'To take a photograph of it,' I say, 'and to make a note for my blog. I left my phone upstairs.'

'You’re like Schubert,' my husband says, 'waking in the night with inspiration and then writing a song.'

'Yeah,' I say. 'I’m exactly like Schubert.'

'I never knew the old Vienna.'

'There are lots of big statues with men on horses,' I say to my husband as we walk across the city to the Belvedere.

'I think you mean equestrian,' my husband replies. 'There’s always a word.'

'I’m really looking forward to seeing The Three Ages of Woman,' I tell my husband.

'What’s The Three Ages of Woman?' he says.

'You know,' I say, 'the Klimt, called The Three Ages of Woman.'

My husband looks at me blankly.

'We have it in the house,' I say, in a gold frame. There’s a postcard of it by my desk. It's on my keyring.'

'Nope,' he says.

In the Belvedere, we see The Kiss. It hangs on a black wall. She has coloured circles with a few rectangles over gold. He has black rectangles with a few coloured circles over gold. They glow together inside a halo of... gold.

The Kiss.

A woman standing next to me isn’t looking at The Kiss, she's looking at my coat. 'I love your coat,' she says, in French.

'Thank you!' I say. 'It’s new and I like it because it’s colourful with a pattern and so many coats are sombre and dark and it’s from this shop in London called Joy and it's really not expensive and you might be able to get it online and it would be even cheaper for you because of the Euro!' All in English.

The woman stares at me, then my husband repeats everything I just said in French, then the woman smiles.

'I do that all the time now, too,' my husband says after the smiling French woman has walked away.

'Do what?' I say.

'Talk to complete strangers,' he says. 'It must be our age.'

Just off the gallery, there is a room with nothing in it except a full-size reproduction of The Kiss, expressly for tourists to take selfies in front of, kissing each other. 

'That's depressing,' I say to my husband.

'Why is it depressing?' he says.

'I don't know exactly,' I say. 'It just is.'

Rock me Amadeus.

Later, in the Mozarthaus, I trail behind my husband while he reads all the blurb on the walls. I want to see Mozart’s belongings: the bed he slept in, the desk he composed at, that sort of thing, but there’s nothing like that. I stare out of the window, trying to imagine Mozart composing The Magic Flute and getting stuck at a hard bit and staring out of this exact same window. Down in the street, a flotilla of Japanese people drifts past on a boundless sea of tourists.

'Is Mozart your John Lennon?' I ask my husband when I catch up with him again.

'No,' he says. 'That would be Josef Haydn.'

In the souvenir shop, they sell pasta shaped like musical notes. I find this depressing as well.

'If music be the food of love..'

In the evening, we see The Magic Flute at Die Volksoper. We wanted to see something at Die Staatsoper but all the tickets had gone. The Magic Flute is wunderbar but I forgot that the story is bonkers.

Next morning, we walk to The Leopold Museum in the rain. 'Es regnet katzen und hunde,' says my husband.

'I’m looking forward to seeing more Klimts,' I say, 'particularly The Three Ages of Woman.'

But we don’t see The Three Ages of Woman. We see a lot of Egon Schiele. 

'I don’t think I like these,' I say to my husband, as we're standing in front of one; this one actually...

'I know what you mean,' my husband says, tilting his head to one side, 'Schiele's paintings are kind of… a bit...'

'Gynaecological?' I say

'Genau,' says my husband. 

'There's always a word,' I say.

E x

P.S. It turns out The Three Ages of Woman is in Rome.