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Comment by ginnungagap | Hacker News Reader

I'm european and I've always been surprised at how far east Vienna is compared to where I imagine it to be. I mentioned this to many people and quite a few very surprised that Vienna is considerably further east than Prague (if you go straight down from Vienna you'll reach Zagreb)

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I jokingly refer to people from Vienna as Slavs who happen to speak German.

As an Eastern European myself Vienna is one of the few “Western” cities where I still feel relatively at home/familiar with, was one of the few cities to which I thought about emigrating when that was still on the menu for me. Their tram network is one of the best in Europe, I can’t see myself living in a city without a decent tram network.

People routinely place Vienna to the south of Munich, when in reality it is almost exactly due east.

I think this is because the generally somewhat valid heuristic - Austria lies to the south of Germany - does not apply to the special case of these two well known cities in Germany and Austria.

It's more intuitive when you remember that Austria-Hungary was an empire spanning much of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and that Vienna was more central to it than it is today to Austria, but I make that mistake of placing it to much in the West regularly too.

More historical cue is that the western parts of modern-day Austria, most notably Salzburg and Tyrol, were not part of the historical (arch) duchy of Austria. With that in mind the location of Vienna is bit easier to picture.

"Östlich von Wien fängt der Orient an"

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