Brittany, Meg, Kevin, Jeff and I went to Vienna last weekend. Friday we all got up early and took a bus, it was 5 hours long. When we got into Vienna we checked into the hostel and headed back to the center of Vienna. The hostel was 30 min by metro away, but worked out ok because it was so close to the station. Friday evening we did a self-guided tram tour and then saw the new Spiderman movie. It was the first movie I have seen in Europe. The audience was less considerate of others compared to the US, mostly it was a couple of guys in the back row who made comments during the movie. And there is one part when Spiderman pauses in font of the American flag and it is a little corny, especially for an international audience.
Saturday we got up and started the day at the Schonbrunn Palace. It is really beautiful; it was the summer Palace of the Hapsburgs, only 4 miles from the winter palace in the city center. Next we did St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and lunch. Then we saw the Hofburg Palace (the winter palace) in the city center, but since we had already seen the Schonbrunn we did not tour the apartments. We did see the Treasury which contained some really amazing jewels and priceless historical artifacts.
The group broke up at this point (mostly because we don’t all like horses, and people were getting cranky) and I went to go see the well known Opera House. But it was closed, I was an hour late. So I decided to walk around the city and see some of the architecture sites we studied in history class. The photo below is the Austrian Post Office Savings Bank one of the first buildings to use this much day light. There is an exhibit of architecture in the lobby, but I only got a few photos in before they closed the building and kicked me out.
Sunday was museum day, Brittany and I started at the Modern Museum of Art, a really nice building with good art in it. Their collection has a good deal of architecture and the traveling exhibit was very interesting, very BLUE. The artist started painting blue on canvas, just blue, a royal aqua marine BLUE. And he then moved to adding dimension with sponges all with out using brushes. The next phase of his work was paint people and using them to get art on the canvas.
Next I went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1450-1650 art. A very nice collection of Bruegel, Van Eyck, Rubens, and Rembrant. I skiped most of the other art in the building, it was HUGE so that I could get to the Opera House for my 3:00 tour.
The opera house was built in the mid 1800’s but mostly distorted during WWII. The central part of the opera house is original but the outside has been restored. The opera shows a new opera every night in order to allow the singers to rest their voices and give their best performance. However, they have to have two crews of workers to take the set down from the night before and then put up another stage for tonight’s performance. It doesn’t seem worth all the effort, and the expensive tickets are sold out every night, but the opera is still not making any money. At least the tours are not too pricy.
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