All stories about "Vienna"

Here's a tidy roundup of the contemporary dining scene in Vienna, including a mention of Österreicher im MAK that we noted some time ago. In sum, the city's finally (carefully!) shedding its stuffy image of stodgy Old European white-tableclothery. [NYT]

After turning in last week's backstage gallery at Vienna's cocktail-bot RoboExotica fest, our international robot affairs correspondent sent in a few follow-up shots before jetting off to Tokyo's 2007 International Robot Exhibition. Drunk-making bots yielded to serious industrial droids and other robots that though they couldn't make you a drink, could at least clean up after you, or perhaps even talk you through a good bender. Simone Davalos' gallery starts below, with word-report after the jump.

Greeting from lovely Vienna, Austria, where I am corresponding from the RoboExotica Festival, the annual festival and symposium on cocktail robotics. Cocktail robotics is a nascent field, a vast unexplored territory of great philosophical and artistic importance. As the organizers say, "Until recently, no attempts had been made to publicly discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication." A few preliminary shots:More details after the jump.

Eventually we will all benefit from 24-like surveillance and will be able to zoom in on any image of any place around the world to catch nerve gas toting terrorists or just to check out the line at our favorite restaurant. Until then, settle for 360Cities, a site that provides 360 degree views of major attractions, public spaces, stores, and restaurants in seven cities around the world. The site probably has more up to date and extensive coverage of Moscow's main areas than the Kremlin and shows you an up close 360 degree views of random old plazas and the tourists that inhabit them in Venice, Prague, Vienna, and Belgrade. Eventually the site hopes to have enough images to aid users in everything from apartment and hotel searches to nightlife guides. And you thought the Hawaiian Tropic Zone webcam was cool! This is just like that but more international. And less nude.

360Cities [Official Site]

--Amanda Kludt

Vienna's Hotel Sacher is a grand dame dating from 1876, though it gets its name from the creator of a famous chocolate cake recipe that just celebrated its 175th birthday. The luxurious central-city hotel was renovated from stem to stern in 2005, resulting in a certain loss of historical character in the guestrooms. However, room decor remains decidedly European, and certainly not anywhere near minimalist. Even the cheapest rooms are very large, and you can scale all the way up to palatial suites with excellent roof-deck views of the city (the top two floors of the hotel are in fact recent additions). Two restaurants, two bars, and a cafe serve gustatory delights, and good luck trying to avoid having a slice of that chocolate cake shoved down your throat (metaphorically or otherwise). Rates begin at €321.

Hotel Sacher Vienna [via AP]

-- Chris Mohney

The extremely Yelp-like Tupalo is too new to have much content, with users and user reviews extremely thin on the ground for the handful of cities it covers so far. Assembled by four wacky pals (two of which come from Rockstar Games), Tupalo rolls in user reviews of restaurants, shops, hotels, bars, etc. with social toys like messaging and friending and all that folderol. However, it does have two advantages over Yelp as currently presented -- Tupalo covers international cities, and its maps are much more prominent. The map implementation is in fact among the best I've seen on any guide site; it's smooth, simple, intuitive, quick, and even aesthetically pleasing. The Tupalo maps will need extensive content infill (not to mention more tagging) to be truly useful, but it's a promising start.

Tupalo [Official site]

-- Chris Mohney

If this photo of a cardboard cop in Vienna proves anything it is Austrians need little to lead them. And at this point I'm refraining from a Holocaust reference, but just barely. Turns out the cardboard cops are meant to scare off potential, and let it be said, half-hearted, criminals much like plastic owls at malls are meant to deter half-hearted pigeons.

ioerror/flickr
Ioerror [via VIenna Metblogs]

Previous Pics of the Day: Czarist Russia in Full Color, Dust Bowl in Full Color, Old Lady in Paris, Brussels, Celebrating Women, Bright Lights Big Titty, Soldiering On, Drunk Santa, Bath House, Hard To Do, Krakow Market, Saul Steinberg, Waterfront Docks, LAX, I Didn't Know Your Mom Was In Town!, Yarndog, Broken Brow In Minneapolis

A1 in Vienna is one of those stores that it takes a few minutes (or hours) to understand what exactly it is they're shilling. This of course isn't necessarily a bad thing. A1 it turns out is selling the future, and futuristic cellphones in particular. The multi-level space, though, is more a dork playground than a regular retail store. An interactive light display traces vistor's movements and projects them into abstract light designs, the facade is a mixture of a fog-and-clouded glass and there's a lounge with impossibly sleek chairs and seamless walls and a soundscape that mixes nature sounds and shameful Viennese house music. Think of the Apple Store then add a bit 2001: Space Odyssey and a pinch of Weekend at Bernies and you've pretty much got it.

A1 Lounge [Official site]

Previously: Pic of the Day: Celebrating Women, Vienna Ladies Like to Exit, Vienna's Oesterriecher im Mak, Vienna Through the Ether

One more reason to go to love Vienna (other than the gender equality exit signs.) This huge ad of women and their lower halves from a posterior view meant to inform women of the dangers of vericose veins...I kid. I kid. They're exploiting women to sell textiles.

Palmer's: Crazy for Passion [via Cherryflava]

Previous Pics of the Day: Bright Lights Big Titty, Soldiering On, Drunk Santa, Bath House, Hard To Do, Krakow Market, Saul Steinberg, Waterfront Docks, LAX, I Didn't Know Your Mom Was In Town!, Yarndog, Broken Brow In Minneapolis,, Hunting Accident

Responding to the disproportionate number of women who perish when someone yells "Fire" in a movie theater, Vienna has unveiled Exit signs for both sexes. Not only will women now know where to exit, but they'll know when to cross streets and dig piles. Pregnant men, on the other hand, will be offered seats on buses.

Vienna to get gender-equal traffic and exit signs [Yahoo.ca]

[Photo: La Repubblica]

Previously: Vienna's Oesterriecher im Mak, Do & Co: Sleek Viennese, Vienna's Scruffy Underground, HR Giger in Vienna, Levant Parliament Hotel, Couching With Freud

Like New York's Neue Galerie, a gallery specializing in Austrian art that houses a restaurant by a famous Austrian chef, Vienna's Museums of Applied Arts (MAK) can boast a restaurant whose food is as much a draw as the art on the walls. MAK's Kurt Gutenbrunner is Helmut Oesterreicher, a chef of much renown in the Austrian culinary world. His menu is a primer in contemporary Viennese cuisine and fits nicely with the museum's emphasis on innovation. Oesterreicher's pike perch with pumpkin in a yellow paprika sauce is as unusual and enjoyable as the hundreds of chairs the museum has on display. The salmon with dough pockets and wasabi sauces is as intricately layered as MAK's huge porcelain collection. And the sweet chestnut cream on a bed of autumnal fruit salad is as enticing as the temptation to compare museum cuisine to museum collections, let's just hope it's more tasteful and less overwrought.

Oestterreicher Im MAK

Previously: Vienna Through the Ether, DO&CO: Sleek Viennese, Why Pictures Now? Asks Vienna, Vienna's Scruffy Underground, HR Giger in Vienna

English expat newsletters are easy to do but hard to do well, mostly the editorial side is anemic and the writers only qualifications are they have a tolerable command of English and they're willing to work for free. How do I know this? Because I used to write for one and those were my sole qualifications. Among the minions, GoGo Paris is probably the best I've come across, well-designed, up-to-date and wonderful picks. But not all city can be the City of Write. Now Vienna can claim an anglophone expat pub. Called Ether, the magazine isn't really Conde Nast quality (or even Hearst quality) but it does have some decent articles and more than enough event listings. Their inaugural issue is available for download, PDF style, and contains lively articles about baby killing factories, breakfast places and a hidden jazz club named Porgy and Bess.

Ether Magazine

Previously: Do & Co: Sleek Viennese, Vienna's Scruffy Underground, HR Giger in Vienna, Levant Parliament Hotel, Couching With Freud

Do & Co is a sleek, a bit foreboding and luxuriously designed hotel in central Vienna. The hotel, designed by Hans Hollein FJ Stijl, is all straight lines, smooth surfaces and cool demeanor. Ok, it's a bit cold. Very cold despite the ETRO amenities. Do & Co started off a caterer and the hotel has the sort of competent but impersonal taste catered food usually carries. The rooms have a tremendous view of St. Stephen's Cathedral--a structure far from sleek--but you feel as if you're looking out the window of a space ship. You can almost hear HAL in the background. I'm sorry Dave, I just can't do that. Oh no, that's the generic clone-like bellboy. While you'll get the "best of the world's cuisine" here, you won't see any fat employees. According to the company's website, "Maximum weight according to height. Ladies: height in cm minus 105 Men: height in cm minus 95." Oh creepy Austrian eugenicists, you're at it again! Rooms from €199.

Do & Co Hotel

Previously: Why Pictures Now? Asks Vienna, Vienna's Scruffy Underground, Levante Parliament Hotel, Couching With Freud, Vienna Underground Google Map

After slogging my way through the curator's statement, all I can answer to Why Pictures Now? is because they're pretty to look at. Vienna's Museum of Modern Art presents this exhibition to "survey [the] major contemporary positions in the art media of photography, film, and video." Whatever that means. The exhibit includes familiar names like Nan Goldin whose A-list photos are well-known to American aesthetes to artists of lesser household renown like Zwelethu Mthethwa (pictured above) and Thomas Struth whose photos dinterrogate the politics of representation, the act of observation and other subtle hegemonic shifts associated with the gaze...Woooaah! What am I sayin'? Not to be missed, Why Pictures Now? runs though October 1st.

Museum of Modern Art [Official site]

Previously: Vienna's Scruffy Underground, H.R. Giger in Vienna, Levante Parliament Hotel, Le Meridien Vienna

$198 Houston to NYC: To hype their new Houston-JFK route, JetBlue is offering flights thereon at $99 each way to start. If you're feeling masochistic enough to endure a JFK transfer, you can go from there to various other northeastern cities at no extra charge (Boston, Pittsburgh, Washington DC, etc.). Book by July 18 for travel September 7 to October 31.

$300 Canada from East Coast: Air Canada has a very short-term sale flogging all routes from East Coast cities to four cities in Canada (Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Halifax), charging $150 each way. Departures include New York, Baltimore, Boston, Miami, and others. You must book by June 29 for travel through September 10.

The New York Times delves into Vienna's Gürtel bar scene, a collection of divey joints built into the archways under the Gürtel elevated train track. It's a burbling mix of crap-holes and uptowny lounges, with a few dance floors thrown in to appease those not yet half in the bag. But you have to laff at this NYT safarilogue:

But the scene at Josefstädter remains gritty, and the climb down from the train will have the uninitiated confused. Across the street is a sad-looking wedding shop and a blackened window advertising "gay erotix." This is the hot new area? Look for the kebab stands, where young clubgoers in stylishly torn T-shirts and shag hairdos usually hover.

Vienna's Underside of the Tracks [NYT]

[Photo: thegass]

Previously: Planter's Club, The 12 Style Commandments of the Vienna Life Ball, Vienna Events Guide, H.R. Giger in Vienna, Levante Parliament Hotel

Swiss alien artist H.R. Giger has a just-begun exhibition at KunstHausWien showcasing over 100 of the bizarro works from his long career. The show includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, photos, and his own line of faintly disturbing furniture design. Apparently there's even an H.R. Giger Bar in Chur, Switzerland. That bar was preceded by another Giger Bar in Tokyo, which Giger himself bailed on due to building codes interfering with his artistic vision; his backers went ahead and opened the bar, and it soon became a yakuza hangout, then eventually closed down. And now the yakuza have this tendency to impregnate their enemies with chest-bursting larvae. Coincidence I'm sure. Anyway, the Vienna show runs until October 1.

HR Giger in Vienna [Metblog Vienna]
Giger [KunstHausWien]

Previously: Couching with Freud, Jewish Museums of Europe, Globe Museum, Vinarchitecture, Summer of Loverpool

Hoo boy, but the just-opened Levante Parliament Hotel (behind Vienna's Parliament building) is an austerely Teutonic cathedral of ultra-modern hotel design aesthetics. Rippling glass, chrome, light stone, dark woods, you got at all -- and of course, tech in every orifice (individually controlled bathroom speakers, anyone?). It's all very, very pretty, if a little intimidating; Grandma would not feel comfortable here, unless she's a Bauhaus performance artist. A 45-foot glass bar dominates the glass-walled atrium bar and restaurant. Rates start at €170 per night.

Pack Your Baggage [Men's Style]
Levante Parliament Hotel [Official site]

Previously: The English Mental Patient, Le Meridien Vienna, Couching with Freud, Vienna Underground Google Map, Planter's Club

Though Sigmund Freud's own psychoanalysis couch is kept in London, his former apartment at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna plays host to a new exhibit called The Couch: Thinking in Repose. It's all about recumbency, people. The exhibit explores both the history and significance of Freudian couchism, but also how couches and positions of rest in general have been regarded and expressed throughout history. Ironically, visitors to the museum must remain standing. The show runs through November 5.

The Couch: Thinking in Repose [Sigmund Freud Museum]

Previously: Jewish Museums of Europe, Globe Museum, Vinarchitecture, Summer of Loverpool, Nude of the Art of the Nude

This map of Vienna's subway system isn't actually part of the expected tide of new Google Maps for Europe, as it was created last month. It's also rather simple, just illustrating the subway stations' locations, lines, and popups with station name and a Flickr photo. Still, many more sophisticated maps along these same lines should start cropping up in the coming weeks.

Vienna Underground Map [Christian Spanring]

Previously: Globe Museum, Urban Transit Touring, Planter's Club, Scout Records, Jewish Museums of Europe

This two-city package is only moderately crazy. You get round-trip airfare, two nights in Vienna, rail transfer, and two nights in Budapest. Default hotels are, of course, crap. The $767 price is based on Boston departure, and it's valid through May 24; other cities and dates available for price bumps. Hard to say what exact travel dates the price is good for, so you may have to hunt around. Expect about $220 in additional taxes and fees.

Vienna and Budapest with the ICE Train [European Destinations]
Top 25 [Shermans Travel]

German discount airline Air Berlin is offering a wide range of €1 one-way fares on many of its European routes. The sales are actually more widespread than you might think on first glance -- the Air Berlin website only displays the special offers in departure cities appropriate for the language you've selected on the site itself. For example, English shows you fares originating from London, Belfast, Glasgow, etc.; French shows a couple departing from Paris. Destinations include Düsseldorf, Berlin, Vienna, and others. Taxes and fees generally add €28 to the €1 price, which still makes it a steal. Fare availability varies, but most work through October.

Vols Paris - Düsseldorf pour 1 euro [berlin]
Specials [Air Berlin, in English]
Specials [Air Berlin, in French]

What could be better than a colonial English club-pub in Vienna's Gründerzeit quarter? I'm not sure, but for comparison's sake, examine Planter's Club. Well over a thousand different liquors may be combined into 250 different cocktails, and of course you may puff imperiously on the finest cigars from the humidor. The attached Restaurant Livingstone serves up a literal smorgasbord of regional fare and pub grub.

Planter's Club [World66]
Planter's Club [Official site]

Previously: The 12 Style Commandments of the Vienna Life Ball, Vienna Events Guide, Scout Records, Jewish Museums of Europe, Mitteleuropean Magic with You in the Middle

The Roundup Roundup collects recent "roundup" articles or general material about cities and city travel worldwide.

Buenos Aires
Bargains in Buenos Aires [Houston Chronicle]

Dublin
A ding-dong old time in Dublin [Times]
Guided around Dublin the podcast way [Times]

Flights
Making sure your bag arrives, too [IHT]
Seat Upgrades Can Be Big Part of Preflight Prep [Chicago Tribune]
If it's Tuesday, this must be Bangkok [Chicago Tribune]

Hotels
Budapest has cheapest sleeps, survey finds [Guardian]
Web fuels cuts in hotel room prices [Telegraph]

Los Angeles
Going To: Palm Springs [NYT]

Manaus
In Brazil, an Exotic Buffet for the Adventurous Set [NYT]

Orlando
Orlando for Adults [NYT]

Paris
An Englishwoman abroad [Telegraph]

Sarajevo
Peace Signs in Sarajevo [Washington Post]

Seville
Seville unpeeled [Guardian]
Seville's Holy Week Rituals Draw In an Outsider [NYT]

Singapore
Culture shocks [Guardian]

Venice
Venetian masquerade [Guardian]

Vienna
Joining the dots [Guardian]

Zagreb
Central Europe by way of the Med [Times]

The Roundup Roundup collects recent "roundup" articles or general material about cities and city travel worldwide.

Bratislava
Bratislava Weekend [NYT]

Cartagena
Going To: Cartagena [NYT]

Dublin
Near a Main Artery in Dublin, a New City [NYT]

Fes
Morocco [Washington Times]

Hotels
Limited-service hotels gain a foothold [Chicago Tribune]

Jaipur
Royal Treatment [Daily Candy]

Gear
Totally Mobile [NYT]

Kyoto
Tales from Kyoto [NYT]

Las Vegas
Vacation In Las Vegas For Cheap [AskMen]

Melbourne
Mellow Out In Melbourne [AskMen]

New Orleans
New Orleans Now [Out Traveler]
In the footsteps of Katrina -- Tent City [Travel Weekly]

New York
36 Hours: Lower Manhattan [NYT]

Rome
Rome's Top 10 Luxury Hotels [Luxury Hotels]

Seoul
Lost Seoul [NYT]

Vienna
Vacationing In Vienna [AskMen]

Viennese vinyl freaks rejoice! Scout Records (Capistrangasse 3, off Mariahilferstrasse) is here to help while away the hours in their back room, where stacks of original LPs are offered for €3 apiece. The store used to sell outdoorsy equipment and supplies, and the new owner couldn't be bothered to change the name, merely adding "Records" for clarity. It's mostly jazz and classic rock (though advertised as also "funk-soul, metal, and beat"), the selection is reportedly worth digging through if you're into musical archaeology.

[Photo: Davie Kaufmann]

Previously: Roundup Roundup #9, Stil-Laden Sneakershop, Wrapping Vienna, Roundup Roundup #17, Jewish Museums of Europe