A quick trip to Vienna

As I’m writing this, I’m on a train back from Vienna where I spent the last two days catching up with friends and a little unofficial Grafana Christmas event.

Visiting Vienna in early December is weird. Throughout the year you’re used to just tons of tourists being in town, but with the Christmas markets all over the city, it feels like there are at least twice the number of visitors here. This was also visible in the hotel prices. My usual places around the main train station normally cost around €100-120 per night. When I went looking some weeks ago, I was shocked to see that they charged now €200+ per night. Note that these aren’t kind of special hotels. Ibis, Prizotel, Schani, … they were all either already fully booked or twice their normal rate.

So I looked around and eventually booked a room at the JUFA Vienna City. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of the room and the breakfast there, despite the chain existing primarily to give young families a chance to enjoy traveling inside of Austria with their kids on a budget. The only downside was that it was in Simmering which is just quite far from the places I usually go to.

On Thursday I worked from the DC Tower in order to meet up with Stefan Koopmanschap who I hadn’t seen in nearly two decades! We worked together in the support team for phpBB and somehow still kept in touch to a small degree over the years. So when I learnt that he’d be in Vienna right at the same time as two coworkers I decided to combine that and visit the lobby area of Symfony Con where I also met Nils Adermann, who had also worked at phpBB at the same time 😅

In the evening it took me then around 40 minutes to get from the hotel there to Stephansplatz and the nearby Gastwirtschaft Pürstner, where our small group of 5 met up for quick Grafana Christmas Meetup and some Schnitzel. Also that place was a pleasant surprise. I had feared it might be too touristy but the servings were good, the prices ok, and the service extremely friendly! The restaurant itself was also very nicely decorated on top of their extremely “traditional” (or stereotypical) look.

Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t as nice anymore and so two coworkers from Hamburg and myself went to Albertina for (among others) an awesome exhibition by Robert Lungo before hitting the Christmas market at Maria-Theresia-Platz. Which was, obviously, also the time for the weather to get worse and so it started raining. Not that this prevented us from checking out nearly all the booths at the place before retiring 😅

So, now I’m nearly back home again, driving through an actually slightly white landscape and hoping for some more snow in the future and meeting more friends in the next couple of weeks!