A dream fulfilled, albeit shamed

An unforgettable experience has its embarrassing moment, though it won't detract from the wonder of it all

- Charmain Naidoo

Two profoundly memorable things happened to me, at the same time, while on holiday this month. One fulfilled a lifelong dream and left me jubilant and wondrously awed. The other will be recorded as one of the more embarrassing moments of my long and mostly uneventful life.

Both happened in Vienna, famously known as the City of Music because of its rich history as the classical world's cultural centre and home to those composing icons Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss.

As an aside, it is also known as the City of Dreams, home to the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who believed dreams helped to access the unconscious mind and who, in 1938, fled Austria before Nazi Germany annexed it and began persecuting Jews.

Another aside: Vienna is also known as the Capital of Europe's Spies, situated so closely as it is to the Iron Curtain of old. A surprising number of spy thrillers of the 20th century take place here, my favourite being John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy, in which he used Vienna as a backdrop for his Cold War spy story.

But I want to concentrate on cultural Vienna, a city with fewer people than Soweto, the locus of my amazement and humiliation.

My love of classical music and opera has taken me to many magnificent venues - The Met in New York, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy, among them, each with its own special beauty.

But nothing prepared me for the magnificence of the Golden Hall in Vienna's Musikverein, which is home to the renowned Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

It was a drizzly grey day when we, a party of four in the city to celebrate a friend's milestone 70th birthday, arrived at the imposing building. Immediately I noticed that we were hopelessly underdressed - me in sneakers and under a cosy, unflattering puffer jacket covering a bulky sweater and casual slacks.