The week began at half past ten on a Sunday night with rain on the windshield of the airport bus and a driver announcing, in two flat sentences, that the city was asleep and the tickets were validated. The hotel on the Waitzstrasse received the bags with the indifference of a place that has done it forty thousand times, and the first plan, drawn on the flight, was already obsolete by the door: everything on the Sunday list was closed, and the rain had opinions about the rest.

Sunday, the arrival that ruins plans

Monday was the week's real Sunday, because Monday is when many museums close and the mistake was made in the right direction. The day belonged to the streets instead. The Ring at dawn was emptiness with a tram line through it, the Hofburg courtyard was swept and shut, and the Burggarten opened its benches to two joggers and a man reading a paper inside a plastic sleeve. Breakfast happened in a coffeehouse on the Burgring where the waiter moved a column's width of sunshine off the table by moving the table, saying nothing, and the day's only purchase was a transit card from a machine that accepted coins with a patience the machines at home had never shown.

Tuesday and Wednesday, the museum days

The art-history museum on Tuesday morning filled slowly from the dome downward, and the right way through it turned out to be upstairs first: the gallery halls before the tour groups landed, then the cupola cafe at eleven when the light through the dome hit the marble. The ticket woman said, "At two there is a queue out the door and at eleven there is you," and the schedule for Wednesday was rebuilt on that sentence. The Wednesday morning went to the chased galleries of the same building while they were still quiet, the afternoon to the Natural History across the square, where a keeper feeding the aquarium said the animals knew the days of the week better than the visitors did. Both days ended on foot, because the Ring walks itself at dusk.

Between the two museum days a pattern about crowds settled in. Tuesday was the quiet one, Wednesday carried school groups, and the same halls changed character completely between them. The practical takeaway was written on the Wednesday evening and used for the rest of the trip: check the school calendar before choosing which museum gets which morning, because thirty teenagers in a gallery are a fact of the room, not a flaw of the plan.

Thursday, the market and the wheel

Thursday morning belonged to the market, arriving by eight when the stalls were still setting up and the fruit sellers were hosing their pavements. A coffee at a standing table cost less than anywhere else in the week, and a cheese seller gave a tasting of the whole board, saying, "Taste first, decide after, this is how it is done." The afternoon went to the Prater and the wheel, which turned at the pace of a slow argument about a full eight minutes, with cabins that creaked in a way the tickets did not mention. From the top the Leopoldstadt looked like a city drawn by somebody who loved grids and then gave up.

The wheel's creak, it turned out on the way down, was the second-best part of the ride. The best was the cabin's window ledge, exactly the right height for resting a camera, and the view that changes character twice in eight minutes: city first, then the park's trees, then the river with its shipping lanes laid out like a diagram. Nobody in the cabin spoke on the way up. Everybody did on the way down, and the conversation was always the same one, about which window seat to claim next time.

Friday and the evening that would not close

Friday was the spare day that saved the week. The morning revisited the coffeehouse with the movable sunshine; the afternoon did the pharmacy museum and two bookshops, and the evening started at a Beisl where the Tafelspitz ran out at nine and the waiter proposed, with mock ceremony, the goulash instead. The next table was a birthday, and by the time the candles had been argued down to two, the kitchen had closed, the room had half emptied, and the birthday table was singing quietly. Nobody left. The bill came after eleven, in no hurry, and the walk home went along the canal where the light was still on the water.

What the week taught, in order

Seven days left five durable instructions:

• Check Monday before booking anything, because arrival days collide with closing days.
• Museums open big and quiet: go upstairs at opening, cafes at eleven, leave before two.
• The market rewards eight in the morning and punishes eleven thirty.
• One unscheduled day is not spare capacity, it is where the week keeps its best hours.
• Every plan survives better on foot after seven in the evening than on any tram.

The flight home left on Sunday morning, one week almost to the hour after the rainy bus. The plan drawn on the way out had been broken on the first night and twice more since, and none of the breaks cost anything. The birthday table was still singing somewhere behind the canal railings, the keeper's fish had eaten according to their calendar, and the wheel had turned eight minutes for each of its passengers with the same creak. A first week is for learning the tempo, and the tempo here, learned late and entirely by accident, is that the city keeps no schedule and keeps every promise anyway.