Vienna’s Best Kept Secrets, Vienna, Austria

As a tourist in Vienna, it is customary to visit the Opera House and Palaces, eat schnitzel and strudel, drink Viennese coffee, ride the trams and if you are slightly musically inclined, go to an opera.

So, after eating through many schnitzels and strudels, drinking gallons of coffee, riding trams to the Palaces, going up in the Ferris Wheel, visiting the Naschmarkt and missing the opera, I turned my attention to that one thing in Vienna which had amused and awed me - the curiously coloured house called Hundertwasser - one of Vienna’s best kept secrets.

If you have ever visited India, chances are that you have seen plenty of coloured houses. Correction - coloured and slightly irregular houses and at a stretch, some with trees sticking out of them. I do not know if they are intended to appear that way - but they exist. Hence, as I tried to focus on a yellow window of the Hundertwasser House I did feel a little cheated. Really now! What was it about Hundertwasser House that drew tourist in such large numbers? Surely not the irregular windows or the colour yellow?

The answer was to be found later in a rather expensive book that curious tourists such as myself dutifully purchased as a souvenir and as a source of information. We were not allowed entry into the apartment for the simple reason that, along with trees and window-plants, real people lived within the painted walls who did not welcome the idea of tourists crawling through their corridors. Hence the book. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).