SATURDAY
Kristin and I had breakfast in the awesome executive lounge - it really is amazing how great vacation is when you don't have to spend 10 EUR on a crappy breakfast in a hotel restaurant - and then took the metro to Schönbrunn, which is the former Imperial summer palace. The name means "beautiful spring" - I learned that one from Wikipedia, no thanks to Google Translate...The palace is 1,400 rooms done in a rococo style. Rococo, for those of you that don't know is an ornate Baroque style...I wouldn't have thought you could make something more ornate than Baroque but the Hapsburgs totally proved me wrong.
The entrance itself was imposing, with two large buildings flanking the palace and pools and statues. For some reason, in Vienna, the touristy thing to do seemed to be taking a horse-drawn carriage, because there was a line of them in the city and at Schönbrunn as well.
Once we made it through the house to the gardens, we got to see the really grand view from the back of the palace past the Neptune statues to the Gloriette. The gardens were also really cool. Very structured, and that made them fit well with the rococo style of the house. All I could think was "army of gardeners", shows you how I feel about gardening! But to get an effect like they did, I imagine I could spend some time digging in the dirt.
The Neptune statues had an interesting interpretation of "sea horses" - they resembled normal horses for the most part, but the front hooves were elongated to resemble flippers and they had a fin like a whale for hind legs. I enjoyed the suspension of reality. Same with the sea-men, the only aquatic part they had was flippers for feet. This particular sea-man had obviously had an injury and visited the hospital.
Maria Theresa decided that the Gloriette (that crowns the hill behind the palace) should be designed to glorify Habsburg power. I was certainly impressed. The gardens are open to the public for free, so there were plenty of people running around the tourists, up to the Gloriette. If you're going to wake up early on a Saturday to run, you might as well enjoy the scenery of the palace and the view of Vienna when you get to the top.
I had to take this picture because lantana happens to be one of my favorite flowers...eh, let's be honest, I was trying to take pictures without people...and that was not easy at Schönbrunn, we arrived at about 9:30 and the tour buses were already there. In an effort to avoid the throngs, Kristin and I climbed the hill up to the Gloriette. Our tickets let us climb to the top of that building as well and we spent some time just enjoying the benches and the view.
Afterwards, we went back towards the palace for the tour. No cameras allowed but a few interesting things:
- The whole place was heated by ornate furnaces that you could see in each room. They were larger than the average American fridge (let's face it, Foster, my mother-in-law's dog, is bigger than the fridge in my apartment) and decorated with gilding.
- The asian art of the time was Chinese. There were whole rooms decorated in blue and white with hundreds of drawings on the wall.
- This shouldn't be surprising but there were lots of paintings, especially given that the Kunsthistorische Museum was the Hapsburgs collection. In the palace, it was mostly portraits and other family occasions. The Hapsburgs were good at having children. Marie Theresa is known as the grandmother of Europe, she had 13 surviving children. She was Marie Antointte's mother as well as Napolean mother-in-law. The Austrians' imperial expansion method was through marriage and alliances rather than war.
- There is a Spanish branch of the Hapsburgs, one of whom was actually the Emperor of Mexico until his assassination. In fact, the Spanish branch is considered to be the major line of the family.
- The palace was wired by Edison in the 1900s, the Grand ballroom still had the original wiring from the 1900s! Kristin and I couldn't decide if it was amazing that it hadn't burned down or if the wiring was just really really good.
After the palace tour, Kristin and I saw a short (and tasty) demonstration of how apple strudel is made. Did you know they spin the strudel dough out just like pizza dough, by throwing it in the air? The dough is also made without sugar, so you can do any kind of filling. The samples were tasty too. =) That was another dessert down, I think apple strudel was #4 on the list.
The palace has a few other garden areas, which highlighted some of the 32 sculpture than grace the grounds. Most of them are of represent deities or virtues. The grounds even have a zoo, which it says is one of the oldest in the world. The statues were just as impressive as the copper ones in Vienna.
There's a garden to the side, with a small tower so you could get a great view of the side of the palace. We had seen this particular garden from the windows in the palace tour and wanted to make sure we caught it before we left. Here is where we made an amazing discovery. Kristin's camera has a panoramic function, where you just hit the shutter button and pan with your arm. I was thinking about it and decided that there had to be a way for us to take a picture with both of us if we used this panoramic function.
So I present to you, the Temple of Doom picture - so titled because we felt a bit like Indiana Jones when we made the hand-off of the camera. This picture required Kristen to slide her finger off the shutter as I slid mine on, all while we continued to pan through the middle of the scene. Actually, that's probably why the picture is a bit tilted...The first time we were too slow resulting in the camera getting angry at us. However, the final picture is both amazing and hilarious. In fact, I am still laughing about it now. I highly suggest that you try something similar if you have the capability with your camera.
The Temple of Doom conquered, we left Schönbrunn and headed for Kahlenberg. Kahlenberg is 484 meters high and lies in the northeastern foothills of the Eastern Alps and in the Wienerwald. It's a popular day trip from Vienna because of the views. Kristin and I debated hiking but then we decided that without a detailed map and directions with landmarks, we were liable to never make it back to Vienna. Fortunately, there was a bus to the top! I felt lazy but with a bit of solid rationalization I was able to overcome the feeling. The view was really impressive. The viewing platform was really crowded, so Kristin and I walked around the back of the hotel to see if there was another platform. There wasn't a platform, per se, however, I thought the reflection of city in the hotel window was really cool.
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| In the middle is Schönbrunn! That's the Gloriette and the zigzag path up from the gardens. You can see from this picture how big the palace grounds are. |
Another attraction for day-trippers from Vienna is Grinzing. Grinzing is known for its viticulture and numerous "Heurige". Heuriger
is the name given to Eastern-Austrian wine-taverns, where wine-growers serve the most recent year's wine. Because of its popularity amongst package tour operators and the decline of professional vintners, Grinzing is less attractive for the Viennese, since Kristin and I didn't know any better we decided we'd check it out. From the Kahlenberg, we could see the vineyards on the mountain.
For a place to be a "Heurige", it has to have a special license, and there are restrictions on what it can serve. This plaque, which was outside of the one we went to, proclaims that the restaurant is serving it's own wine. The one we went to had a huge collection of corkscrews, a board inside proclaimed that it was the biggest and oldest in Austria with over 3,000 examples.The one we went to served typical Austrian wine - white (Grüner Veltliner is the local varietal) and sweet. However, it was served in these .25L cups, which is WAY more than a normal restaurant glass of wine.
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| We were pretty silly by the end of these, considering that Heurige don't really serve food. |
After the wine, we took the metro back to the city and hit up another concert cafe for dinner and dessert. I don't think there was a meal where we didn't get dessert, but at least we were splitting them...after the music wound down, we headed back to the hotel and hung out in the executive lounge where they had drinks and snacks. Gotta love hotel reward points.
SUNDAY
Sunday morning was an early one for us because we got tickets to Mass which included the Vienna Boys Choir signing! The mass was held at Hofburg, which was the winter palace for the Hapsburgs. The hall was very small but very ornate. The choir was heavenly, it made up for us not going to a Mozart/Strauss concert while we were in Vienna.
I got scolded when I took the picture above of the choir. I guess the shutter on my camera was too loud for the lady next to me to hear them...it's probably a good thing, at that point I had stopped listening and was just focusing on the pictures. Kristin said that she probably shouldn't have gotten a say because she didn't tithe anything.
After mass, we wandered down to Belvedere, which is a Baroque palace complex built as a summer residence for Prince Eugene of Savoy. Eugene was one of the most successful military commanders in modern European history, and served the Austrian empire. There's a museum in the Belvedere which has an exhibit of Gustav Klimt, an Austrian painter, including one of his most famous works,
the Kiss. The muesum was nice, but the paintings were hung such that you couldn't look at them straight on because of glare from the windows. That got old fast, especially in comparison to how amazingly done the Kunsthistorische museum was.
After the Belvedere, we headed back to the city center to find some food before the imminent rain. We returned to the Museumplatz, where the Kunsthistorische Museum is located, however couldn't find anything that looked decent and had indoor or covered seating.
We ended up taking the metro to another stop. Fortunately, we found a great little restaurant that had vegetable strudel, which was amazing...to the point where I was tempted to order another.
We also had our final dessert of the Austrian experience, another one from the list, Linzertorte. I think my favorite was the Gugelhupf from Friday, I was tempted to get it a few other times, but in the spirit of trying new things, I resisted.
Kristin's taking pictures of her food has inspired me to own being a tourist. She said she even does it in the US! I hope over the next few years I can take enough food pictures to have some inspiring ones for my kitchen when I get back to the States.
So that was Vienna! I had a great time and totally recommend visiting if you like museums, architecture or classical music. It's also close to Bratislava (driving distance) and Prague (by train).
The other fun thing I decided in Vienna was my souvenir. When I was young, my family spent a summer in England. Because even then I loved to read, everywhere we visited I bought a bookmark. Over the years, I think I've donated most of them, but it was worth a smile to look at them and remember that I'd been there. While I know I'll have lots of pictures from everywhere that I go, I wanted something tangible from these trips that I'm taking now as well. And even though the prospect is a heavy one, I think I'll be searching out a book store where ever I go. The best thing is, that the book itself doesn't even have to be useful, the spine just has to be pretty! I bought the two books below, a book on art and architecture in Vienna in German (the top one) and a cookbook with traditional Viennese recipes in German and English. Wes has promised me a library in our next house and with most of my reading material on the Kindle now, it makes sense for me to find other books to put on the shelves...
OK, that's all for now, folks. Next up in weekends away is Brugge, Belgium and may be Stuttgart, Germany, both at the end of July.
For everyone in the US, enjoy your day off tomorrow!
