Pack It Out, Pack It In, We Came To Wien (Vienna)

We took an overnight train to Vienna, sharing a cabin with a nice Indian couple. Vienna is a pretty sharp contrast to Krakow in several ways: it is more modern, it is larger, more efficient and nicer public transportation, they speak German (which we are better at than Polish), and much more expensive. It is an extremely beautiful city, if you’re trying to get somewhere to see something it takes you twice as long because you are always stopped by something else amazing to see. There are parks everywhere in the city, including an enormous one along the Danube River. We stayed in a room that had a kitchen, so we actually made some home cooked meals, which was a nice change of pace from the heavy meals in the Czech Republic and Poland.

About a 15 minute walk from our hotel is the Rathaus, which in German means Town Hall. The building is huge and you can see if from many parts of the city. There are several well-kept parks in front of the Rathaus that seemingly connect to other parks next to other government buildings and museums.

This beast of a building is actually just a part of a complex of buildings that include several museums, government buildings, and the national library. The first day we stumbled upon it there was a vintage car show that included Porches, Alfa Romeos, Ferrarri’s, Opels, MGs, Mustangs, a host of other mostly European cars, and this Lamborghini Countach (something we’ve never seen in person):

Vienna loves their classical composers. This is Strauss’s statue and there others we saw in the city including, Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart. We watched a performance of an eight piece orchestra with opera singers and dancers that featured music by Mozart and Strauss - it was really good.

We visited the Globe Museum, which had hundreds of globes that date as far back as the 14^th century. There was info about the history, techniques in production, different styles, and evolution of globes. Globes used to be made in pairs, one terrestrial and one celestial, because it was thought that there was a second sphere that made up the sky.

This is an apartment building complex called the Hundertwasserhaus, built by an architect known for these colorful, oddly shaped designed buildings. There are a lot of colored tiles as well as uneven floors and surfaces.

This is St. Stephen's Cathedral (Stephensdom), the main church in the city. We climbed the roughly 350 steps to the top of the main tower and got a panoramic view of the city. The tiled roof was very colorful and intricate.

This is Schloss Schonbrunn, the main residence of Maria Theresa, and then Franz Joseph, of the Hapsburg dynasty. It has over 1,400 rooms (we saw 40 of them) which included some ridiculously ornamented rooms with gold gilding, inlaid art, hand painted walls, tapestry, and Chinese porcelain vases hung from the walls.

We caught a morning practice of the Spanish Riding school. The horses are trained to do some goofy but amazing things like intricate footwork, walking diagonally, and even standing on their hind legs. The reward for doing these things: sugar cubes.

We toured the Vienna State Opera house. Much of it was destroyed during WWII, but it is renovated nicely and the surviving original rooms are incredible. They perform a different Opera each night of the week and at most repeat an Opera only 4 or 5 times in the entire 10 month season. There are over 2,000 people involved in putting on an Opera, with 500 backstage crew alone that work in shifts.