A wet welcome to Austria

This morning we flew out of Athens and, with it, said goodbye to Greece. In a very fitting gesture for our last few hours in Greece, our plane broke down on the tarmac and we all had to disembark, hop on buses and board another plane. In all, we were 90 minutes late on our departure. This seemed to sum up our experience of Greece; nothing quite worked the way it was supposed to. Greece is organised chaos, with the emphasis on chaos. It is often dirty and many, definitely not all, Greeks are a little ruder than we are accustomed to.

Although this looks like a church, it's actually the city hall

By contrast, our arrival in Vienna was to an airport clinically clean and exceptionally well organised. I think that if the Austrians weren’t Austrian they’d be German, and if they weren’t German they’d be Swiss, such is their obsession with order and punctuality.

The Austrian Parliament building

One of the many museums in Vienna (we lost count of how many)

Unfortunately, one thing the Viennese cannot organise is fine weather. It was raining when we arrived and has been for most of the day. It is a beautiful city, without question, but the grey sky seems to augment the predominantly grey buildings. We’ve no doubt that in the sun, the city’s wide avenues and incredibly stately buildings would look resplendent in their glory, but today, they look a little drenched, just like us. The forecast for the next few days is actually no better to slightly worse, so it is possible we may not get to experience Vienna in the sun. Oh well, I guess there are lots of galleries, museums and palaces to keep us busy.