Two days in Vienna deserves a hearty post, and the best way to construct a large but digestible post is to give it the structure of a photo-journal. So here it is, divided into three parts:
Part I: General city attributes, including my transportation
Part II: Day 1 of Touring--acting like a tourist
Part III: Day 2 of Touring--mostly just walking around + an obligatory discussion of local animals
Part I: General comments
It seems like the city roads are made of rings, platzes, and straats. The rings are literally concentric ring-streets that comprise a big loop around the center. A "platz" is a square, often with a church, that just sits wherever it wants to within the rings. "Straat" just means street, and comprises the rest of the connecting roads.
My bus tour brought me by a large area of public housing constructed after WWI. Rebuilding after wars seems to be the most common theme I've experienced in my trips to Europe.
I went to Vienna on a boat that went surprisingly fast over the water in either direction. Here is one of the cooler parts of our trip, where we stopped for 20 minutes to float up to the top of a lock before traveling on to Austria.

This seemed to be a classic image in the downtown area: rich historic architecture with a new twist.
Part II: Acting like a tourist
On Saturday, I bought an all-day ticket on a hop-on, hop-off tour bus that went to all the major tourist attractions in the city. It seemed like a good idea, and it turned out to be a great structure for my short visit (especially because it informed my wandering on Sunday). Pictured above is part of the gardens at Schönbrunn Palace, which was a summer residence for the Hapsburg family during the days of the Empire (and Napoleon, while he was doing his thing). I went inside and saw how luxurious the palace was, etc., but my favorite part by far was the gardens. Please take note of the little sign at the bottom of the above picture--these signs were everywhere, and I later saw one in another part of the city that read as follows:
I'm pretty sure that the blue ink makes it a rocket-propelled grenade.


A subway station. It looks very "European." I think that by that, I mean that it is clean and makes use of geometric shapes in an aesthetically pleasing way, but I'm not sure.
Part III: Not stressing out so much about seeing everything
Sunday (today) was a great day. I started out by going across the Danube to see the relatively new Vienna International Center and Donau-City (literally means Danube City). I could only see the VIC from a distance--it houses various international agencies and is not open to the public (pictured on the right). However, Donau-City with its charming new-age apartments, international schools, and strangely constructed convention centers, was a good place to wander around.
On the way back from Donau-City, I saw this. PKK: The Kurdistan Workers' Party? I have done a little research on this party as part of my job in Slovakia, so it was strange suddenly to see grafitti from supporters of a Turkish terrorist organization near Donau-City in Austria.
This processional was in a platz near the city center that I happened to stumble upon. I was told that it was related to the 200th anniversary of the composer Haydn's death, which was apparently today. Apparently they really do like music in Vienna.
I am officially a bird whisperer. It was just child's play catching pigeons red-handed on my porch, but now I can look a duck straight in the eye from across a pond and it will swim over to me and let me take pictures.
Does Donaupark (and Austria for that matter) have mutant squirrels? This one has dark fur and weirdly long ears... I did a google search and could only come up with "Abert's squirrels," which look similar but are only native to the Rocky Mountains. It remains a mystery.
I hope this is an enjoyable set of pictures. I don't intend to have as touristy of an experience as I did in Vienna on my other side-trips. I'll be meeting up with a friend in Prague this weekend (which hopefully means less mindless picture-taking), and my next trip after that will probably be to Auschwitz in Poland via Krakow--still touristy, but not flashy like Vienna. Still, what's an American's trip to Europe without flashy pictures?