Vienna Celebration Of Life

Vienna is giving a surprise with the incredible boom in its youth scene. Wild clubbing, hot gigs, day-long street parties, an entire island to live it up and a profusion of cafés and places to hang out make up the pulsating, young face of the venerable Danube metropolis today.

The classic beat for Vienna-scene freaks was and remains the Triangle around St. Ruprecht’s Church in the old town. The pubs here are trendy as well as full of life and zest with pubs like First Floor and Krah Krah, Ma Pitom, Kaktus or Ron con Soda.

Spittelberg - the revitalized Biedermeier area in which Donau Bar, Plutzer Bräu and Verde are just two of the many trendy haunts that surround the Amerlinghaus event center. Spittelberg is always in season: in winter, when a sticky sweet aroma of hot punch hangs in the air and the Christmas market comes alive, and when summer comes in, when the first warm breezes of May drift down the lanes and the pavement cafés that spring up mark the beginning of several months of effervescent street life.

When the sun shines on the Copa Cagrana, the strip of embankment on the Danube near the Reichsbrücke Bridge is a small world in its own right. Bars and restaurants, cafés and beach discos make this the ideal place for cool drinks and hot flirts from May to September. The Copa Cagrana stands for high life, Vienna style, enjoyed by plenty of others apart from the many who take the day off to go swimming, sunbathing, wind-surfing, biking and skating on Danube Island.

In summer the Vienna youth scene finds the coolest place to be is out of doors. It’s time to join the others sweating along with the Vienna City Marathon that runs through the heart of the city.

City events like the music-film festival in front of City Hall lure visitors with their combination of warm summer evenings and big-screen showings of concerts and opera performances by legends like Karajan and Bernstein. Here, artistic enjoyment goes hand in hand with culinary pleasures when one’s taste buds go on a world tour round the countless food booths.

In the “Tanzquartier Wien” in the Museumsquartier dancing performances now have their constant home. Local and international programs are interpreted and shown there in new productions every week. Also the ImPuls festival has become a window on the latest developments in dance around the globe. Top ensembles, soloists and newcomers from the dance world present a wide variety of trendy styles such as modern dance, contact improvisation, Hip-Hop, Break-dance and dance theater.

It will be wrong to assume that Vienna is only about the musical giants of bygone centuries like Mozart and Schubert is way off beam. The city has quickly risen to become a super power in electronic music and has produced DJ stars of today along with sampling and remixing gods like Kruder & Dorfmeister, Pulsinger & Tunakan, and DSL.

Vienna's youth scene is booming as never before. Whole quarters of the city appear as if the hills had never been alive with the Sound of Music and as if the Viennese had never heard of a waltz. The motto is of the youth is to go out, tune in, cut loose, relax and dance.