My first weekend side-trip: Vienna

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

Vienna--or as they say in Austria, "Wien"--was an amazing place to go for my first side-trip.  Generally, my self-imposed rule for picture-taking is that the only kosher pictures are those that go with a story, but I found myself mindlessly snapping pictures of all the beautiful buildings.  The above picture is from Michaelerplatz, a square near the city center with lots of churches nearby.

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.

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.

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.

It was raining on Saturday morning, but it made the gardens that much better.  It was truly a joy.

Yeah.

For lunch on Saturday I had Wiener Schnitzel!  I hadn't been exactly sure what it was and I thought it was going to be one of those "you-force-it-down-so-you-can-say-you-did-it-because-you're-a-tourist" experiences, but it was actually quite good!  Just in case, it's kind of like a breaded steak, and salad and potatoes are standard accompaniments. 

One of the tour bus stops was an amusement park called Prater.  I rode the first coaster I could see (cause I didn't have much time before I was supposed to "hop on" the bus again), called Dizzy Mouse.  Email me for the video and you can have it in August when I'm back.  It was a thriller.

The most elegant part of the Austrian National Library complex, which houses museums in addition to the actual library.  I visited exhibitions about old musical instruments (cool stuff, considering the city) and medieval armor!

Part of what I loved about the city is that you turn a corner and out of nowhere, there's another beautiful church.  Even on a busy Saturday, there were very few other people around.  This one is an Italian church that I went inside briefly.

Forget what I said about other people.  This is basically in the heart of Vienna, right by a cathedral called St. Stephen's.  An unreal number of people.

I had planned in advance to go to a legit concert Saturday night, and I wasn't let down at all.  This small room (I was near the back when I took this picture) is called Sala Terrena, and it is the oldest concert hall in Vienna.  Mozart used to work and play in it back in 1781.  The musicians' group is called the Haydn Quartet--apparently they are a well-kept secret that I stumbled upon.  Maybe it's just the advertising that says so, but they were still excellent.

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?