Let's just start with some pictures, because a large part of the impact of Vienna is just how old and ornate everything is. We opened up our tourist guides and found way, way more things to do in there that we were interested in than was possible to accomplish in the day and a half before we had to get serious about getting airborne. So take a look at some of what we saw, and then I'll get into what we did.
Normal street view in 1st District
Another view from the same place, looking at a nearby building
The front of that nearby building, which is the Children's Opera apparently
Ok, so this is the Hofburg (Imperial Palace of the Hapsburgs and the residence of the Austrian president), not a normal building, but it is fancy, and would be fancier without all the temporary crap around it
Well, the first stop was the hotel, to which we took the subway from the airport where the bus had dropped us off. We'd picked one a few subway stops out from the center of the city so that we could get something a little classier for less money. Our choice, a hotel in a re-purposed textile plant, was quite pleasant. Dropping our stuff there, we headed back out and took the subway to the 1st District, which is where the majority of the cool part of Vienna is, according to our maps. We went down the long list of museums and things to do in Vienna (the opera was sold out, we checked) and picked (nerds that we are) the Natural History Museum because 1) we're nerds and 2) it was open late on Wednesday nights so we'd get more museum for our money there than at other places. The Natural History Museum building itself was probably worth the price of admission - it was built by the local royalty a couple hundred years ago and is splendidly ornate inside, in addition to the impressive collections of minerals, fossils, animal specimens and the like. We were accidentally without our camera during this visit, but search "Vienna natural history museum" at Flikr and you'll get results like this here.
Interior courtyard of our hotel
Picture of the outside of the Natural History Museum from the next day
After the museum, and we stayed several hours, we were in need of dinner. We went and wandered around all kinds of stupendous buildings and narrow streets before finally and erroneously settling on a restaurant which proved to be overpriced and under-excellence'd. The food was merely average, the prices higher than they should have been, and the service poor. On the plus side, it was definitely edible, we were hungry, the wine was very interesting and good (they sell wines in Austria that you just don't see in the US or Japan, are distinctly different, and at least in some cases really good) and we could afford it. After dinner it was quite late and we caught one of the last subways back to our hotel.
In the morning we had one clear and overriding priority - PONIES. At least according to Ana. Vienna is home to the Spanish Riding School, home and training grounds of the Lipizzaners. They didn't have any shows scheduled during the time we were in Vienna, so we couldn't see one of those, but they do have a practice every morning that the public can attend if they're willing to fork over about $20 each for the privilege. Thus, we grabbed sweet buns from a bakery, took the subway to the 1st District, and made our way to the annex of the imperial palace that houses the riding school. Several hundred other people had the same idea for a Thursday morning, but we apparently beat the rush and had very good seats. You aren't supposed to take pictures inside the school (or eat anything for that matter) but given the price of entry and what we were actually seeing I felt we were quite entitled to a few pictures and eating my breakfast. Ana kept saying things like, "Oh, that's nearly impossible" and "Wow!" while I looked at horses that mostly looked to be walking funny to me. They did a few of the more showy tricks, like having the horse balance on its back legs, jump vertically, and then land on the back legs again, but that only happened once or twice and I think Ana missed it. I found a picture of it on the internet though. I think I can skip practice in the future, but I would definitely like to see a real show.
Outside the school of extraordinary pony-ness
Illicit picture from inside the school of extraordinary pony-ness
Delicious fish entree
Being snazzy in fancy restaurants in Vienna
Admittedly not terribly photogenic venison entree
Fed, and quite pleased with lunch, we picked another museum to visit, this time the classical art museum. I'd say a lot of what we saw and read was more educational than entertaining, and we saw a LOT of Renaissance-era and later paintings. Our findings - everyone paints scenes from the Bible all the time, but almost unanimously fails to consider the fact that the Middle East of many hundreds of years ago did not look like what you see out your window in Austria or Italy in the year 1700. Also, when one artist made a painting that everyone liked, everyone else started painting the same painting and now all those paintings are now hanging on the walls of this one museum in Vienna. That said, reading the captions and histories of the different paintings and seeing the historical elements alongside the fantasy stuff was worth doing once, even for non-art-educated persons such as us. The Greek and Roman statues and other antiquities were probably more fun than the paintings, and there was no shortage of either, though the coin collection billed as one of the biggest in the world seemed really small to us. Also, the inside of the museum itself was mindblowing, as hopefully the pictures can show to some extent. Seeing architecture like this changed my opinions somewhat on elaborate decorative schemes - done with unlimited money and power amazing things can be achieved.
Hey look, I can sort-of-creepily-smile in Europe too
Kind of spectacular museum interior shot
After leaving the museum, we contemplated the evening. With a lunch as good as we'd had, we didn't really want to go out to eat and have something inferior at a restaurant, so we sought out a grocery store (we also tend to explore grocery stores wherever we travel, so we checked that box by doing this too) and bought all kinds of luxury items like cheese and wine and chocolate for a late dinner whenever we decided to return to the hotel. Ana had spied a large gelato restaurant during our wanderings, and went and bought some of that (mango for me, chocolate and blackberry for her) to tide us over until that dinner. Our remaining priority after gelato was to get pictures of Vienna landmarks lit up at night, which we'd previously seen but not photographed. It was a pity that several landmarks had all kinds of stuff in front of / in / around them for some kind of citywide convention that weekend, but there was still a lot to see and a lot that looked good despite the junk in the neighborhood.
I had to use kung-fu to get my cup back from her
The first time we saw this cathedral, we thought, "this doesn't look quite real" then figured out that parts of it were in fact facades put up to cover the areas where they were doing restoration work.
We need a better low-light camera, this was so much more awesome in person
After doing our best to capture some of the local beauty, we returned to the hotel and scored some roast chicken and salad from the hotel restaurant to supplement the goodies we'd already purchased and had a quite satisfactory dinner full of things we can't get in Japan, or in some cases merely wouldn't care to pay for here. In the morning, we made a much more leisurely trip to the airport than on our previous voyage, with no time pressure, and made the trip back to Japan. We didn't have much time in Vienna, but we put a lot of activity into what we had and enjoyed it a lot. I think we'll have to look for an opportunity sometime in the future to come back and do some of the things we missed this time around.
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