I was crawling into bed after a long travel day when the news alerts flashed on my phone, one after another. “Taylor Swift’s Vienna Concerts Are Canceled After Terror Plot Arrests” from The New York Times. “Taylor Swift cancels Vienna shows after two arrested on suspicion of plotting attack” from The Washington Post. Those were quickly followed by a text message from my friend Ale, who’d managed to score the tickets. I rushed to read through the stories and felt my heart constrict further with each one. 

The trip happened to fall during a particularly busy period, both personally and professionally. So aside from cataloging a few points of interest and some restaurants on a Google map (the first ritual in my travel-planning process), I hadn’t actually made firm plans before I’d left my home in New York — a deeply uncharacteristic move. 

Laying in my compact-but-charming “Shoebox” room at the new Hoxton, Vienna, which opened this past March, I alternated between doomscrolling Eras Tour Instagram accounts and checking to see what was on at the various museums I’d pinned so I could cobble together an itinerary. When I finally forced myself to try sleeping around 4 a.m., I had a rough game plan: I’d spend a whirlwind 72 hours focused on culture, architecture, and food.

I’d already started off strong on my first day in town. After picking up our VIP tour packages at the Ernst Happel Stadion, Ale and I met up with her husband at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Austria’s largest art museum. The Renaissance Revival building itself is visually arresting, with a 200-foot-tall dome and opulent marble entrance hall, and the collections it contains are no less impressive. I lingered in the Portrait Gallery for a while, taking in paintings from Vermeer, Velázquez, and Caravaggio, among other masters.

Afterward, we headed to dinner at Alma Gastrotheque, which was recommended to me by a fellow travel writer who knows my penchant for natural wines. Basking in the warm Viennese night at an outdoor table flanked by citrus trees, we tore into a parade of small plates, including tangy sourdough bread slathered with salted butter, juicy summer tomatoes, and peaches paired with creamy stracciatella cheese, and oven-roasted cauliflower laced with lemongrass and ginger. Our bottle of Renner & Rennersistas Welschriesling 2018 — the lightly funky orange wine our server suggested — was the perfect complement. 

The next morning, I treated myself to a lie-in (a luxury as a toddler mom!) before meeting my friends at the Natural History Museum. I may not be much for the visual arts, but I could spend hours letting my nerd flag fly in halls packed with gemstones, rocks, and fossils. I took my time examining the display cases. The first one to catch my eye showed off the various stones used in famous buildings across Europe, including the Palace of Versailles and Westminster Cathedral. Other cases contained a spectrum of gems and minerals, from chartreuse hunks of sulfur to knobs of moss-hued pyromorphite to a massive hunk of turquoise malachite. And, of course, there were meteorites and countless fossils. Turns out, the idea of mass extinction has a way of putting a canceled concert in perspective. 

Still, I was eager to salvage what parts of the concert-going experience I could. As I wandered, I found myself scanning peoples’ wrists for beads, signaling that they, too, had “made the friendship bracelets” — an Eras Tour tradition stemming from Taylor’s Midnights track “You’re On Your Own Kid.” 

I handed purple Speak Now-themed bracelets to a couple of Iowans, exchanged a golden Fearless with two teens who’d traveled from Ukraine, and swapped Red-inspired “Eff the Patriarchy” bracelets with a Canadian girl who wore a glittery statement t-shirt reminiscent of the ones Taylor wears in that album’s era. Trading took on a decidedly bittersweet tone. Instead of giddily swapping baubles in stadium aisles and bathroom lines, we stopped each other next to dioramas about the evolution of man and bonded over our bad luck.

For lunch, my friends and I stopped by Erich, a Mexican-leaning café in the hip 7th district, before parting ways for the day. They headed to the Sisi Museum, dedicated to the Habsburg Empress Elisabeth, while I made a beeline for the Austrian National Library, which houses more than 12 million books and objects. Beneath the frescoed ceilings of the recently restored Baroque state hall, gilded bookshelves display 200,000-plus books from the early 16th- through mid-19th centuries.  

Again, I bumped into several would’ve-been concertgoers who were as happy to swap bracelets as they were recommendations for places around town where Swifties were congregating. One twenty-something from Texas mentioned impromptu sing-alongs taking place at both Corneliusgasse (a street whose name echoes “Cornelia Street,” a popular track off Taylor’s Lover album) and Stephansplatz, the city’s de facto main square. 

That night, I headed to the latter before grabbing a twilight cocktail at Neue Hoheit, Rosewood Vienna’s stunning rooftop bar. As I sipped my drink, I could hear strains of “My Tears Ricochet” rising from the throngs of Swifties who’d gathered in the square. 

When I left around 10 p.m., the crowd was just starting to sing “Delicate,” and I couldn’t resist joining in (1-2-3 chant included). As colorful balloons bounced from person to person, the sadness was palpable, but so was the joy. Sure, we may not have been belting out the 10-minute mega-version of “All Too Well” 65,000-strong, but there was still catharsis in a few hundred of us gathering to raise our voices together. 

I dedicated my last day to seeking out modern interpretations of Viennese emblems like coffeehouses, classical music, pastries, and, of course, schnitzel. I grabbed an espresso tonic at the Jonas Reindl Coffee Roasters near Schottentor before strolling through Rathauspark and sated a craving for viennoiserie with a vanilla-raspberry Danish at Öfferl, which two different friends had recommended. I attempted to peep Gustav Klimt’s work at the Belvedere Museum but couldn’t snag a ticket early enough in the day. So, after walking the grounds a bit, I hopped over to the House of Music. The interactive museum ended up being as much an ode to great classical composers like Haydn and Mozart as it was a psychedelic sound fantasia where you and three other people could DIY a symphony by rolling virtual dice. 

That night, I capped things off with an early dinner at Schlawiener Wirsthaus, a lively pub in the 4th district. As I waited for my heaping plate of wiener schnitzel and potato salad, I took another spin through social media. On TikTok, I caught someone live-streaming a Stephansplatz gathering where people were launching into the chorus of “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” as they marched in place, mirroring Taylor’s tour choreography. Only here, the fans had changed the lyrics to “smallest men” — a clear allusion to the three terrorists whose plot had tanked the Vienna shows.

Nothing could really take the sting out of having flown all the way from New York for a show I’d been wanting to see for over a year. But I felt a kinship watching fellow Swifties channel their disappointment into this sort of group therapy. We were all safe, which was the most important thing, and we’d still gotten to experience something special together, even if it wasn’t quite the visit to Vienna we’d all expected.