Vienna: It Waits For You

With no internet connection in my hotel while in Vienna, I haven’t been able to post much from here – only what I’ve managed to get done at McDonald’s. Gotta love the golden arches. They are like little American embassies located all over the world.

So what have I done in Vienna? Surprisingly little. One of the reasons is that I am only here for three days, ending on Thursday morning. The other reason is that I spent half of one of my two full days here in bed going through detox, but we’ll get to that.

When I first got here and connected with my hotel, I, as I usually do, dropped my stuff and walked around the neighborhood trying to see what I liked, what I didn’t like and getting ideas of places to go. You know who else lived in my neighborhood? Ludwig van Beethoven, who evidently lived here for a couple years shortly before he died. There’s a “Ludwig slept here” sign on one of the buildings and underneath the sign is a bar/restaurant named Ludwig Van’s. I don’t know about you, but I can’t hear the name Ludwig Van without thinking about A Clockwork Orange, so I just pictured the inside of it like the “bar” from the opening scene of that movie. I didn’t go inside to test the theory.

One problem with being in Vienna right now is that the city is under renovation. There are a few places that you need to go when you’re in Vienna and inevitably, when I got there, parts of places were covered in scaffolding and/or hidden from view. I had heard that one of the places that I needed to see was Stephansdom, so I went there first. It’s a church from the middle ages. I went inside, took some photos and walked around it for a while. I hope that underneath the scaffolding somebody is doing some cleaning because the outside could really use it.

Not too far away from Stephansdom is the complex known as the Hofburg Palace. Again, much of this was under construction or maintenance. Part of the complex, the Neue Burg, contains a museum, but not being in a museum mood at the time I was there, I didn’t go in. (As an historical aside, Hitler proclaimed the annexation of Austria from the balcony at the Neue Burg in 1938.) Again, I walked around, took some pictures, and enjoyed the beautiful afternoon.

I finally came around to being in a museum mood, however, and ventured over to the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Like many of the museums of Europe, this one contains your standard Ancient Egypt wing and Ancient Greece wing, etc. The highlight of the museum, and the area in which I spent most of my time, is the art collection. The museum has a tremendous collection of art from the Dutch Masters, as well as others, of course. I took lots of pictures and will post them on Facebook in the coming days. With respect to the one I selected to accompany the blog, I chose it because I liked it’s name. It’s Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “Sommer.” (I assume that the actual name was whatever the word for “summer” is in Arcimboldo’s native tongue, but since the museum is in a German-speaking country, the name is “Sommer.”)

As all of you know, and are excited about I’m sure, Tuesday and Wednesday nights this week saw Champions League action in European football. Since I had to watch, I went to a bar called Die Bibliotek down the street from my hotel because I saw a sign outside saying that it would be showing various matches. I met a few Germans who were there to watch the Stuttgart match and we’ll just leave it at a good time was had by all. Because of the good time, however, I spent most of today recovering, so I did nothing in the morning.

In the afternoon, I went to the Belvedere Palaces, which were built in the early-18^th century. The buildings truly were magnificent, as was the courtyard in between the two main buildings. Again, I took lots of pictures, but they aren’t going to do justice to the botanical garden on the premises.

Okay, I suppose those are the highlights of my time in Vienna. As I write this, it is Wednesday night. Tomorrow morning, I check out and hop a train to Bratislava for a brief, one-night stay. On Friday, I head north for Prague. I’ll keep in touch.