Tell me baby, do you recognise me?

It seems I am developing a habit of returning to Vienna every three years.

I first came here on a German course in the summer of 2003. I remember the heavy heat which left the entire city weary and breathless for weeks on end; our landlord, who owned a family bakery on the ground floor and every week brought up a tray of unsold loaves and sweet pastries, and once asserted that northern Germans had no culture because they ate schnitzel with mustard. I remember walking back from class with my roommate the day I turned 23 and telling him how much I hated having a fuss made on my birthday, minutes before we entered the flat to the extravagant surprise party he had arranged with our other flatmates.

Three years later I was back, to a different flat and a better school. This summer was even hotter, bad enough to kill off thousands of old French people and bring the rest of Europe to its sweating knees. I had a flatmate who had fled the USA as a teenager and spoke a curious, half-remembered kind of English, and sometimes used my laptop to arrange gay intrigues in the city. I visited the opera and the famous Heuriger, the wine taverns that cluster on the lower slopes of the Wienerwald, and stayed at the parochial house of a village called Pinkafeld, whose Indian parish priest happened to be a classmate of mine.

Now it’s 2009 and I’m back again, this time for three weeks, then from January to April. I went for a wander into the city last night to watch the city tugging on its Christmas finery. Most of the decorations are already up, well before the real tourist season of December. I was also here for a conference in early December 2006 and found the place heaving, its Weihnachtsdörfer, Christmas Villages, packed with heavily-wrapped tourists clutching cups of Glühwein in their mittened hands, the air booming with the songs of those great Viennese composers, George Michael and Bing Crosby.

Last night George and Bing were at the Christmas Village on Maria Theresa Platz, but the tourists weren’t; that is, not in anything like the numbers that December will bring. It was good to walk between the rows of huts without being crushed, thinking about buying a hot drink or a crepe of a piece of Christmas tat, maybe a hand-carved Santa or a little wooden nutcracker, and deciding not to because Christmas Villages are not designed for solitary enjoyment.

Instead I moved on, pausing only to take a snap of Maria Theresa - a kind of Austrian Queen Victoria - squatting graciously and approvingly above us.