Wien Stadtfest - Vienna City Festival

Today, a minor miracle happened: it was sunny! The whole day! 

This worked out great, as I had made tentative plans with friends to hang out at the Wien Stadtfest, the Vienna City Festival, basically a street party for the city.

We met at a stage in front of the Hofburg Palace, and watched a Balkan jazz trio perform.  Seems like a strange combination of music styles, but it was really quite excellent!  When they were done, we moseyed to another stage a few blocks away at a location called Am Hof. I'll have to go back there, nice architecture, etc. There was als a tall slightly disturbing statue, topped with an animal (dragon?) with an arrow through it's neck and spewing fire (or vomiting) and flanked by 4 soldier-cherubs attacking snakes with their swords.

Anyways, we ate some of the lunch we's packed while listening to a mediocre classic rock band.  Really, the only interesting thing about them was that their stage costumes consisted of white shirts and neon orange overalls. On the way to the various venues, we came across some excellent street artists, apparently hired for this festival (meaning they were not collecting money).

There were giant butterflies,

Stilt people and their "queen" (looking like they came straight from the Venice Carnaval)

a devil on spring feet,

and a British (?) trio playing entertaining music on toy instruments.

Later, we headed towards the Burggarten park for more music and to meet up with another friend.  We settled on some blankets on the big lawn in front of the stage and had a picknick.  The music here was more or less rock, and more or less good.  But we mostly chatted and people-watched.  Towards late afternoon, I left to fetch a sweater at home (just 3-4 blocks away) and detoured on the way back to the park to pick up a bottle of wine at the supermarket.  After another hour or so, we went to have dinner at a nearby organic restaurant called "Wine Embassy".  (Needless to say, it has an excellent Austrian wine selection.) 

After dinner, we went to Stefansdom (St Stefans cathedral) to see the Longfield Gospel Choir.  We got there about 10 minutes early, to realise the gates to the inner church had not yet opened, and people were massed in front of them.  When the gates finally opened, a tidal wave of people carried (ok, pushed and shoved) me into the church.  There were so many spectators we ended up standing in the main aisle to watch the concert.  And what a disappointment that was! I knew there was something fishy when the choir came in and they were all white-skinned.  And then they started singing: the first song was tolerable, but then came The Circle of Life (i.e. The Lion King intro), complete with slightly off-pitch soloist.  And in between each song the choir director felt the need to talk for a while.  After about 10 minutes, we looked at each other and walked out of the cathedral.  We knew this was going to be a popular show, and somehow thought it would be an American choir.  But it turns out the name of the choir is kind of misleading: the choir is actually local to Vienna.  And not gospel so much as sounding like a group of people who once went to New Orleans, heard gospel music and thought "hey, bet I can sing like that too": there was no real heart or excitement in it.

But the evening still ended well: to cheer ourselves up we went to a fabulous gelato place and got huge ice cream cones.  What a great day!