Our Grinzing Neighborhood

The last two evenings we have been strolling our neighborhood. It is no exaggeration to say there must be 100 restaurants, often adjacent to each other in rows, within a half mile of our apartment. Most of them are heurigers, with wooden tables on stone patios inside courtyards and sometimes up long, leaf-dark corridors lined with pots of bright red geraniums, white-light wisps on candles, and orange-red lanterns. Potatoes, cabbage, and pork feature prominently in the posted menus we consulted, and always wiener schnitzel, which seems to be the only way that they prepare veal here. Some of the restaurants are quite informal and some quite elegant, and all with live music--which is perhaps in the definition of heuriger--some with piano and strings, and some with accordions and strings. The evenings have been cool and pleasant, sometimes with spritzes of rain; we wonder how long it will be before indoor dining becomes the rule.

Down one street from us, less than a mile, is a modest house occupied by Beethoven in 1808, and a place once the residence of Strauss is also nearby. Large, very old trees abound; the public green areas and yards, including that of our apartment building, tend to be overgrown, shrubs rarely if ever pruned, with grassy areas of clumpy green. Our sidewalk in the morning has an abundance of 2-3" brown slugs inching their way to work, and we wonder where the birds are that should be breakfasting on them. We see birds only rarely, a surprise given all the natural housing that the many trees provide for them. The untended look to many of the yards and the slightly rundown little park near the village center is in marked contrast to the city parks and green spaces downtown, which are meticulously trimmed. Many a large, luxurious home sits on our side streets, though the main street, on which our modern if bourgeois apartment building sits, also has small and medium individual homes dating perhaps to the 18th century, as well as what look like Soviet-era design apartment buildings: large, sturdy, boxy structures with square-cut windows in blank plain flat facades--reminding me of what D.H. Lawrence, writing of his travels in Switzerland, called "a vigorous ordinariness." Near the main street and the Grinzing tram end-of-the-line are small shops and groceries, including two bakeries, a news kiosk (yes, it sells the International Herald-Tribune), a bank, a sundries store, and a few shops purveying glassware and women's clothes. The two churches we have been in look to be Baroque, but modestly so, as if the funds for the usual excess were not available, and so the ceilings are left bare and side chapels are furnished sparsely compared with those in Rome.