Am back in Singapore, so this post is really late. Still, bear with me, ok?

/clears throat

To Germans and Austrians, it's Wien ('cos they pronounce W as V and a 12th century English scribe in a fit of ignorance wrote it as it was pronounced and so we have been left with the horrifying legacy of the "weener").

To English speakers, it's Vienna.

To me, it's expensive and arty. Like Prague's sister who likes to go shopping a lot. With the Habsburgs who provided the money, some of the results are sumptuous, sprawling palaces, beautiful museums that still struggle to match their contents. The Kunsthistorisches Museum (which somehow translates into "Fine Arts Museum") is perhaps the pinnacle, with a mind-boggling collection of fine and famous Western art. If you're a fan of Bruegel (the Elder), Reubens or plush purple couches that are more comfortable than your hostel foam mattress, this is the place. For behold! The couches are aplenty and the audioguide is included in the ticket price.

Alas! Alack! I missed opera season. Instead I found purveyors of "The Classical Top 40", attired in Baroque court clothes with wigs and all instead of the 20th century garb their contemporaries in Prague wore. Eh.

Wiener Schnitzel? The city's namesake dish should be tried but only in the same way you're nice to your bratty cousins at a family wedding - 'cos you're there. It's a very large breaded thin pork cutlet. An extra large tonkatsu if you will, but served with salad and sauerkraut instead of wheat noodles. Not saying it's bad. It's just only as good as a deep-fried chunk of meat is.

Not all of Vienna's stuck in the past. As part of summer festivities, the city authorities have set up a giant screen in front of the Rathaus. The grounds right in front of the City Hall were filled with food stalls selling beer and food (not snacks but real, meal kind of food). Tables and benches formed a large dining area that was packed when I was there. And on the giant screen? Films every day. Well, not really films but recorded concerts and dance performances but the important thing is that there was a giant screen in front of City Hall and you could go watch a something arty every single day for two months. Now we just need someone to convince the Austrians that Playstation 2s are artistic.

The most memorable part of my stay in Vienna is courtesy of two Australians (Hey Peter! Jeremy!) whom I had the fine fortune to meet at the hostel. One night we tried to get into a club. So we went there, found out that we had an hour to spare and naturally we went to a neighbouring caf� and drank for two. We returned to the club, only to be told by the burly folk at the door that we had to be on the "guest list". So we left, unhappily, while one of the Aussies questioned whether the list dated from the Third Reich. On our way we came across an Austrian karaoke pub.

Did you know that there's a song called "I am from Austria"?

The pub was packed - we discovered (how did we do that?) later than we'd crashed a personal birthday party. No one spoke English, and being model tourists we couldn't speak any German. But a fat Goth male, with a bald head and a large beard to match his girth, wearing occult symbols around his neck, was the friendliest towards us. He seemed to be a dominant figure and I'd like to think that was why we survived the night. We were mostly ignored, and so the Australians and I murdered the German language endlessly that night.

But we really enjoyed� umm� hanging out with the locals. We like to think of ourselves as having made, tentatively perhaps, in our own little individual drop-in-the-mightly-ocean way, a small step towards international friendship, world peace and the end of global poverty. Peace through inferior singing!

THE HILLS ARE ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!

With the sound of tourists. Salzburg is full of them. They come for the Mozart and The Sound of Music movie. The Sound of Music tour was shamelessly advertised everywhere in my hostel and the endorsement by the original Maria von Trapp is kind of pathetic. But I can't blame them - whoring cultural icons for tourists is everywhere. It's much worse for poor Wolfie. He's got his own chocolate with competing brands. Do you want the mass-produced one? Or the (allegedly) original Mozartkugel? Or the one that noone's ever heard of? There are Mozart liqueurs, Mozart scarves, Mozart ties, Mozart silverware and even Mozart cologne and perfume. How ironic that the genius died depressed, overworked and dirt-poor. He was buried in an unmarked grave and the memorial you see in the Vienna graveyard in which he was not buried, was put together by gravediggers from gravestone scraps.

It's so strange. The Mozarts sold all their furniture. The reconstructions you see in Salzburg, they're all from contemporary accounts or from details dropped here and there in family letters (wouldn't sell I'd bet). To see a cardboard cutout of Mozart holding a modern box of chocolates and smiling outside a shop, is an incredibly unnerving experience.

That said, I managed to catch a performance of Mozart's Requiem in a church. The performers included the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra so there was some kind of standard. That, my friends, was the high point of my stay in Salzburg. Even the stupid girl (I shan't name her country of origin) next to me on a school trip doodling noisily with her ballpoint pen until I asked her to stop, couldn't spoil it for me.

Oh, and the silver-wrapped Mozartkugels taste better than the mass-produced gold Mirabell ones. Remember that when you go :)

Next: Tokyo wa yoru no shichi ji!