The Cows Come Home
September 19-21, 2025
We never intended to stay in Berlin for 10 years, but life rarely goes to plan. There were plenty of things we loved about living in the city that made it easy to stay: affordable cost of living, good friends, and a location that facilitated regular travel throughout Europe and beyond. But there were also elements of Berlin that we couldn’t wait to put behind us. Clear at the top of that list was our apartment.
There is a terrible housing shortage in Berlin, and getting a flat is no easy feat. Once you do secure an apartment, you will likely never give it up unless someone else is willing to transfer their rental contract directly over to you. An inordinate number of people in Berlin are stuck in handshake deals with subletters several levels deep, leaving them with no safeguards from having the space taken away at a moment’s notice. No matter how crappy your apartment is, it still isn’t crappier than having no apartment at all. In such a ludicrously oversaturated market, there is simply no guarantee you will ever find what you want or need.
Our apartment was bad. Ground floor apartments in Berlin notoriously have mold problems, and ours was no exception. Everything in the apartment got moldy: the walls, the furniture, our clothes. There was water damage in the bedroom that stained an entire wall yellow 10 feet high. The cheap laminate flooring bubbled up in the entryway, making it nearly impossible to open the front door if someone stood in the wrong place. When the 50-cent falafel place we shared a hallway with went out of business and the space was remodeled, it caused an exodus of cockroaches to flee in search of new homes. Ours was the closest option. Our neighbors were perpetually unable or unwilling to deal with their garbage like adult human beings, refusing to separate trash and recycling, throwing broken computer monitors and cat trees in the food waste bin. Even worse, they would often leave open bags of food waste on the ground in the courtyard. The ensuing vermin infestations caused our terrace to sink into the ground three separate times, thanks to all the tunnels the rats dug out beneath. We were perpetually fighting with our landlords to fix something - anything - for a decade straight.
So, why would we possibly choose to stay in that shithole for so long? For one, we got one of the last cheap rental contracts before the prices in Berlin skyrocketed. If we moved, the price for anything comparable would have nearly doubled. The location was also unbeatable: everything we could possibly need was within walking distance, with a major bus line outside our front door and a subway station five minutes down the street. Our neighborhood was an absolute garbage dump - quite literally covered in trash at all times - but it was a hip garbage dump with world-class bars and delicious, affordable restaurants. Every time we cursed our terrible flat and filthy neighborhood, we had to remind ourselves that there were literally thousands of people in the city who would trade their living situation with ours in an instant. We did our best to make the place cute and regularly sprayed the walls with bleach. For better or worse, we were going to live in Neukölln until we left Berlin for good.
That opportunity finally came in 2025 when Mazz was offered a new job at a university in Vienna, Austria. Strangely, with all the travel we’ve done in the last 10 years, we had never actually made it to Vienna, so it had never even registered as a place that we might want to move. Once the offer was on the table and we started to actually look into it, we found that Vienna was very much up our alley. It’s a beautiful city surrounded by nature, with the alps only a few hours away. The food and wine culture is exceptional, and best of all, none of the streets are covered in trash. Mazz accepted the position and we began the long process of disentangling our lives from a decade in Germany.
Goodbye, Berlin
We got very lucky securing a new apartment in Vienna: A former professor at the university who had moved away still owned an empty flat in the city and had offered it up for an incoming hire. In a fun catch-22, Austria requires a physical mailing address inside the country to even begin the residential and employment permitting processes, so being offered a flat straightway made our move exponentially easier than it could have been. We signed the rental contract having only seen a few pictures on the internet, but it promised to be both bigger and cheaper than our flat in Berlin. How could it possibly be worse than what we were leaving behind?
After spending the entire month of July enjoying ourselves in the US, the entire month of August was spent cleaning, shedding large amounts of our personal effects, and figuring out how to properly escape German bureaucracy. For years, Kirb had suffered sleepless nights lying awake in bed, dreading what it would take to get ourselves out of that apartment and into a new life in a new country. Once that time was finally upon us, we’d love to say that his worry was unfounded, but the reality was just as bad as he had been dreading. That apartment was truly nasty.
We rented a big van and sold every piece of large furniture except for our couch; whatever fit in the van was coming along to Vienna. We decided to break the drive up into two days, stopping overnight at a campground in the Czech Republic that rented rooms. We had no intention of parking an enormous van filled with all our possessions in a city overnight. The next morning, we rolled into Vienna, paid two nice Serbian gentlemen to haul all of our stuff up three flights of stairs, and spent our first night in our new apartment as citizens of Vienna.
Unfortunately, we had to drive the van right back to Berlin the following day and spend the next 48 hours deep-cleaning our horrible flat to try and get our deposit back. Since we had already sold or moved all of our furniture, our buddy Mark let us crash at his place down the street. As a thank you, we took him out to a final dinner at our favorite restaurant in Berlin, Barra. We’ve had a lot of fantastic celebration dinners at Barra, and our final meal there was as good as any of them. It was Mark’s first time at the restaurant and he contends that it was the best meal he has ever eaten in his life, evidenced by the fact that he licked every single bowl and plate completely clean before giving them back to the waitress. She was genuinely impressed by his dedication to enjoying every last molecule of the meal.
Legend says he’s still licking the plates to this very day
Finally, somehow, the apartment was actually spotlessly clean and we turned over the keys to the property management company, with Mark chaperoning to make sure nothing was lost in translation and all of our bases were covered. After ten years of fighting with our landlords at every turn, we were genuinely shocked to have our entire damage deposit returned. With the keys handed over, we went directly to the airport and left Berlin behind for good.
Hello, Vienna
The entire month of August had been lost to the move, but we were thrilled to have all of September to get to know our new city. Initially, we were a bit dismayed to discover that our new apartment in Vienna was in a very similar neighborhood to what we left behind in Berlin. Much like Neukölln, Favoriten is low-income and predominantly Arabic, although the Austrian version has a large population of Eastern Europeans as well. Unlike Neukölln, where we lived next to a canal and many excellent parks, there are far too few trees in Favoriten, and the beautiful edifices found on buildings all over the city are suspiciously absent. Two blocks from our flat, there is a daily produce and clothing market called the Viktor Adler Markt that draws big crowds and makes a lot of noise. We call it the Souk.
Our new apartment is an upgrade in just about every conceivable way, although it is housed inside a dumpy old building where people are constantly smoking cigarettes in the hallway. Still, as a stepping stone to a future, more-ideal apartment, we couldn’t be happier. We count our blessings daily to have finally moved into a mold- and pest-free home. The neighborhood may lack the architectural beauty and green spaces common in more affluent areas of Vienna, but like Neukölln, Favoriten offers immediate access to just about anything we could want. We have a great deal with the owner of the flat that allows us to stay for as long or as short as we need until we find exactly what we’re looking for. We certainly have no intention of getting stuck in another imperfect living situation for the next ten years of our lives, even if the only “imperfect” elements of this apartment are that we can’t have pets, wish it had a guest bedroom, and would prefer to live in an area with more trees.
Vienna is a lot smaller than Berlin, and as a result, getting to know the city feels much more manageable. Public transit in the city is incredible and is something the locals are quick to praise, especially in comparison to German trains, which have become the laughingstock of Europe in recent years. The busses and trains in Vienna are always on time and can get you virtually anywhere you want to go. Though our neighborhood feels dumpy and run-down, it’s only a 10-minute subway ride from one of the most lavish city centers in Europe. It takes Mazz about 15 minutes door to door to get to work. Getting to the edges of town takes less than an hour.
It’s here, on the edges, that we were most excited to explore. Vienna is a wine city through and through, with vineyards that butt up against residential neighborhoods all along the north. There are walking trails called Stadtwanderwege through the many parks and green areas. Trail #1 takes you over Kahlenberg, one of the last foothills of the alps, and through the vineyards in Nussdorf. Here you can find a very special type of Austrian bar called a heuriger (or buschenschank) where visitors can drink wine and eat food at tables set up among the grape vines, overlooking the city. Without getting too far into the terminology weeds, a heuriger is a Vienna-specific term for an establishment that might serve warm food and drinks they didn’t produce themselves, while a buschenschank serves only their own wine and only cold food. All buschenschänken are a type of heuriger, but not all heuriger are buschenschänken. Make sense? We’re still trying to figure it out too.
There are several such establishments on Stadtwanderwege #1, and depending on which direction you go, the path can start or end with them. We stopped at Buschenschank Feuerwehr Wagner at the end of our hike and ordered their house grüner veltliner with some smoked pork and hard cheese served with fresh horseradish and mustard. It was all delicious, and as we ate and drank looking down over our new city, we couldn’t help but laugh at our good fortune. Going for a hike and then drinking wine outdoors is a key cultural activity in Vienna, and we honestly can’t think of many things we enjoy more.
The next weekend, we went a bit farther afield to Neusiedl am See in the Burgenland wine region. Some of the best wines in Austria are produced here, many of which we knew from our time in Berlin, like Koppitsch Winery. It was only because Mazz follows Koppitsch on Instagram that we learned about the Neusiedler Sturm Wanderung, a specific annual walking and wine drinking event. We took the train an hour from Vienna and were deposited right at the foot of the vineyards, where we paid €5 deposits for wine glasses and began walking along a set path through the fields. Every five minutes or so, a new winemaker had set up a makeshift heuriger where you could buy wines from the previous vintage or glasses of “sturm” from the current ongoing harvest. Sturm - which means “storm” in German - comes from the first press of the grapes and is only partially fermented, with a cloudy appearance from the active yeast. The flavor ranges from sweet to sour depending on the grape, and tasted significantly different from stall to stall. At only €2-€3 per glass with a low ABV, it was easy to sample the offerings from each winemaker along the trail without getting thoroughly sauced. Our favorite, unsurprisingly, came from Koppitsch, the winery we were most excited to see. Their wines are reliably light and delicious smashers, and their sturm made from chardonnay tasted like strawberry lemonade.
When we decided to go to Lainzer Tiergarten on the western edge of town for our next outing, we were shocked by how wild the park is. At the entrance, we found signs warning against bears, wolves, and wild boars, and it wasn’t long before we came across several large boars right off the trail. We had to remind ourselves that the animals lived in a park right next to a major metropolitan city, so they were surely more accustomed to seeing people than we were to seeing them. After several weekends of pairing our walks with delicious wines, we couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed when that afternoon hike didn’t end at a heuriger. We will have to be careful not to develop a Pavlovian response to hiking that makes us instantly crave wine (any more than we already naturally do).
Back to the Mountains
Even though we decided to move to Vienna without ever having seen the place, we were thoroughly impressed with the other parts of Austria we’d visited. Specifically, we loved our time in the Austrian Alps, and even though Vienna isn’t exactly next door, it’s much closer to the mountains than we were in Berlin. The first time Mazz visited Austria on a work trip, she accidentally came across and “almabtrieb” - a yearly event where farmers bring their cows down from the mountain at the end of the warm season. The cattle are decorated in ornate headdresses and driven in a procession that is joined by locals and tourists alike. When she saw that an almabtrieb was being held in late September in Ramsau am Dachstein, home of arguably our favorite campsite in Europe, we decided to make it our first in-country expedition as Austrians.
You can use the regional trains to get just about anywhere in Austria, but we decided to rent a car to make things easier and operate on our own schedule. Taking off on a Friday afternoon, we made it to Camping Dachstein in time to cook dinner at sunset and enjoy a night of vivid, unimpeded stars.
The next morning, we decided to walk the few kilometers into town instead of taking the car, following a path that led along streams and through idyllic sun-dappled forests. It was easy enough to figure out where to go once we reached town, as the parking field at Walcher Hof was already nearly full and the grounds were bustling with food and drink stalls, festival seating, and a live Oompa band. What wasn’t so easy to figure out was where to find the cows. We knew that they would be coming from the alm up on the mountain, but we didn’t know if they would be traveling along the main road with all the car traffic and busses, or along the much shorter hiking trail. Based on the description online, we deduced it had to be the road, but as we hiked up the winding hills and spoke with others waiting for the procession, we found they didn’t know for certain either. We continued to climb up the steep road and time continued to pass with no cows coming toward us, and we started to worry that we had somehow messed everything up. Then, right as we were about to turn around, we were greeted by a dozen beautiful heifers in magnificent floral headdresses marching our way.
There was already a large crowd of people that had gathered at the alm to dress the cows up in their finery, and we joined in their procession as the cattle were driven down the mountain. Poor, unsuspecting cars trying to make their way up the road to the gondola found themselves surrounded and immobile as animals and throngs of people swarmed past.
As the animals were ushered into the grassy fields of Walcher Hof, the party began in earnest, and the drink lines stretched long. We ordered glasses of sturm and took in the scene: a sea of dirndls and lederhosen, stands selling fresh farm butter, cheese, and all manner of cakes and pastries, and a live band playing schlager music. It was sunny and hot; one last gasp of summer at the end of September. We decided we didn’t particularly want to keep drinking alcohol in a sunny field early in the day and took a bus back to the campsite. It was still early enough that we could catch a cheese festival being held in a castle in Sölk on the other side of the mountains. This event ended up being a much smaller affair than the almabtrieb, but we still came away with some nice mountain cheese and some incredible smoked red deer meat from a local producer.
The head of the procession
The next morning at the campsite, we moved leisurely and soaked up our last opportunity to enjoy nature like this for the season. Just down the road, we found a hike at the Silberkarklamm that looked like the perfect combination of time and effort, letting us enjoy a final, sunny day in the mountains while still allowing us to get home at a reasonable time. We were happy to see everyone else in the parking lot take off in a different direction than us.
The trail begins with a slow and steady ascent up a hillside that overlooks green mountains and rolling valleys. At the top, you’re rewarded with a panoramic view of the Silberkar cirque, with the Silberkarhütte visible below at the base of the valley. The hut was packed with people when we arrived; most just do the short hike up the through the slot canyon to visit the hut for lunch. There wasn’t an open place for us to sit anywhere, and we were glad we had brought food of our own so we could eat and move on. The final leg of the route down was the titular Silberkarklamm, a stunning series of wooden walkways that follows waterfalls to the base of the canyon. By the time we reached the bottom, we agreed that the hike was surprisingly one of the best we’ve done anywhere in Europe, combining a little bit of everything we like about the mountains into a few excellent hours.
The feeling of, “Wow, that was even better than we expected,” seems to be pervasive in our first months living in Austria. There’s always a lot of risk involved in uprooting your life to move to a new country. Thankfully, our risks have been rewarded with new opportunities to enjoy some of our favorite activities. Anyone following along with our adventures should know by now how much we enjoy food, wine, and the outdoors. Austria takes great pride in excelling at all three. We think we’re going to like it here.