This story is part of the November 2 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories .

Twenty years ago, I met an Austrian girl at a bus stop in Sydney. We spent 24 hours together. Then I moved to Vienna three weeks later. It was the middle of winter and the city was beautiful but bleak, like I’d landed in a black-and-white Ingmar Bergman film. I didn’t know a word of German. Not that it mattered; no one spoke to me anyway.

I spent months exploring the place. Trams criss-cross this compact city, so I rode trams down every cobbled street, and walked until I was hopelessly lost, then tested myself trying to get home again (no GPS in those days). I discovered that – forget Paris – Vienna is Europe’s prettiest city. And yet, in these cloudy winter months, Vienna felt lifeless, like a museum,

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