Vienna 3

On Tuesday I visited the Donauturm for a panorama of Vienna, took a tour of the UN building, visited the Stephansdom now that the Pope has left, wandered down one of the fancier shopping streets, found the strange (painted in pastel panels and held up with glazed columns in the shape of bannister-posts from stately home staircases) Hundertwasserhaus, wandered in the gardens of the Schonbrunn palace, and went to the zoo. Got thoroughly soaked twice, but Rohan trousers dry fast.

They do not have two pandas, they have three; but it takes a long time for the mother to lick the baby panda into shape, so mother and baby were not at home to visitors. They have a large glass-sided room full of ring-tailed lemurs: 50% kitten, 50% monkey, 75% tail and 103% cute.

I'm in Belgrade as I type; comfortable sleeper train, except that at 2:15am Hungarian customs come on board to check you out of Hungary, and at 3am their Serbian counterparts come on board to check you into Serbia. Also the train was roughly three hours late, but this meant it got in at a nice civilised 9:15 rather than a somewhat tiresome 6:30.

To the fortress, Carruthers!

Belgrade I

Take up Vienna like a rug from its position in the European Plain. Shake it a little so most of the money falls out, and drape it across a rocky patch at the confluence of the Danube and the Seva. Add a thirty-hectare fortress, built by the Turks and now reduced to its foundations and used as a climbing-frame for the small children of the city; the maintainers clearly have a strong belief that the beauty of its many precipitous drops would be critically spoiled by fences or signage.

Arrange that the house-painters' and plasterers' unions have been on strike since 1987, that an alliance of the Lignite Power Station Corporation and the Large Diesel-Powered Truck Drivers' Filial Association has been responsible for traffic and environmental issues for the same period, and that the pothole-removing budget has been embezzled.

This is roughly Belgrade. The night-life is reported spectacular; this evening, I went off with a group of Germans to the cheek-by-jowl bars on the misnamed (an E is missing) Silicon Valley. The reports turned out to be wrong; perhaps Wednesday is the wrong time for night-life.