Location: Vienna, Austria
Population: 1.6 million
(Language = German)
Toussaint's Day Vacation is in full swing. Get ready for a capitals tour of Central Europe - a la Leslie. So...the vacation starts Thursday evening in Aix. Delicious family dinner at the Bachs, then a little packing job, then bake a chocolate cake with Kerrie and Alyse and proceed to eat the entire thing, then roam the streets a little with Kerrie and wind up at Auberge Hugo in the wee hours of Friday morning, where I proceed to listen to music, futilely make a first attempt all semester to watch House on the internet, take a forty-five minute nap, and hang out with Sam until 4 am, when I go back home, grab my bag, and meet up with some people from my group at the bus station for the first bus of the day to the airport (4:40 am). This being my second near sleepless night, the previous night being devoted to homework, I'm really really tired but sitll really really excited to be off traveling again. Fly Marseille-Munich-Vienna, find my hostel which is right near Westbanhof train station, and start exploring.
First stop: Schonnbrunn Palace. Schonnbrunn palace is a little out of the heart of Vienna, behind this nice big park with lots of playgrounds and the Technical Museum of some sort that I passed by. It's similar to Versailles I'd say in its setup, with gardens behind it and the big square out front. Schonnbrunn was built as a hunting castle for the Hapsburgs and then was progressively renovated and became Maria Theresa's summer residence in the 1700s and by the 1800s Emperor Franz Joseph made it his permanent palace. I went on a tour of the imperial rooms and learned lots of things that I've probably forgotten by now. Okay, so we saw the State rooms and private apartments of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth (his wife), and the 18th century interiors from the time of Maria Theresa. The audio tour was really good, the rooms would change from one focused on Maria Theresa to one focused on Franz Joseph, which was a little confusing. The interior decoration as a whole did not seem nearly as lavish as I remember Versailles being or, in comparison, the Royal Palace in Brussels. Only the royal bedroom had this ginormous bed with a brocaded coverlet of lace and gold and pearls which seemed fitting for a palace, though come to think of it I guess we didn't go into that many furnished rooms. Most rooms just had a few pieces and lots of portraits and paintings on the walls. We saw Franz Joseph's room, and he really slept in just a simple wooden twin bed and had a prayer stand next to it, his office, again not well furnished with jsut a big desk and some curtains and a rug, his bathroom (same deal), his aide-de-camp's room, who gave him all his military information (he reigned from mid 1800s- to 1916, 68 years total. He was apparently a very devout man and prefereed the austere lifestyle. His wife Elisabeth on the other hand, affectionately known as Sisi (at the Hofburg palace there's a museum with her art collection), travelled a lot and was apparently rarely in Vienna. She was married to Franz at the age of 16 and though he was head over heels for her, she seemed to be more independent and didn't like being forced into marriage. She was super beautiful and spent most of her day keeping up her ankle length hair (!) and doing sporting activities to keep her figure. When we got to the family dining room, the guide said Elisabeth was never usually at dinner because she did not eat a lot to keep her slender size (wow, women haven't changed a bit). Franz Joseph actually had a pretty hard life, Elisabeth was stabbed and killed when traveling in...not sure where but not Vienna, their oldest son Rudolf committed suicide in 1898, his brother died somehow, then the Archduke/heir to the throne his nephew Franz Ferdinand was assassinated (trigger of hte first world war) and some other tragedies are thrown in there as well. Anyways, we visited the reception room of Franz Joseph, where he saw an average of 100 people a morning and listened to requests or conferred titles or received praise for his good rule, and the waiting room/billiards room where everyone would play billiards when they were bored. That room was super cool because the walls had these huge paintings painted directly on them of a street scene with the coronation of someone, and the wedding ceremony of someone else, but they were really intricate. We saw some bedrooms, learned about how great Maria Theresa was for protecting her title and lands in the war of Austrian Secession and how much she loved her husband Franz Stephan (House of Lorraine) and how she wore black everyday for the rest of her life after he died. Maria Theresa had a thing for Asian contemporary art, so there were some really interesting rooms with chinese lacquer and rice paper paintings on the walls Iblue and white), a black lacquered room with yellow painting of asian scenes, and the most valauble room in the house was the Millions room, which was made of a really really rare rosewood but it had these little spliced up panels of Indo-Persion painting scenes that we cut up and reframed to be inlaid on the walls in cool designs/sizes, almost crescent shaped, with wall molding fashioned around the paintings. All the rooms had these big porcelain standing heaters that were used as the heating system. There was also a Napoleon room which had the walls painted with scenes of little Napoleon's son out in the streets doing business of something like that. Empress Sophia's daughter (Emperor ____, I want to say Franz I but really I have no cool, there were way to many of them...)married her daughter Maria Louise off to Napoleon to end the feuding of the families in 1810, they ha one child who was the only heir of Napoleon. When Napoleon was exiled, Maria Louise came back to the family with the child but she was only let back in if the kid could have no place in politics, so he was essentially locked up in the back of the palace but he ended up being really good at commerce...then he died of a lung disease at the age of 21. Continuing, there was a ballroom, two other chinese oval/circle gallery rooms, and a small concert hall where Mozart played his first concert for the Emperor/Empress at the age of 6. The chinese rooms were cool because the designs on the walls went from floor to ceiling, there was no border area like you usually see, so it really felt like you were boxed into this design (or ovalled in as the case may be). The ballroom had two huge chandeliers and lights on the walls with candles that were purposely flickering to reflect how it would have been in the time before the castle was electrified (1900), because the special lacquer they put on the walls made it really bright and reflective when the candles flickered. Thus ended my tour of the galleries, but wait, I bought the combined ticket, so I still had more to see. From there I went out into a side building and saw the Apple Strudel Show, which was this girl who showed us how to bake traditional apple strudel (I didn't know it was an Austrian dish ) and gave us free samples that were pretty good, not super sugary. That's because, as I then learned, there's no sugar in the dough and not that much in the filling. She had this dough that she kneaded, rolled out, and then proceeded to stretch until it was so thin you could read a newspaper through it by pulling it from elbow to elbow, it was practically covering her and it didn't break! it was impressive. then she just put a ton of the filling into it (the filling was like apples, rum, more rum, raisins, cinnamon sugar, and breadcrumbs) and then rolled it up and twisted the ends so it was a big cylindrical shape. She was telling us how to make it at home and saying the bakery had a help hotline and all this but I highly doubt anyone could do this at home, really. But the lesson was cool because she'd say it in German and then in English line by line, and the German sounded very pretty. The whole scene was very idyllic. Next I hit up the gardens, which were enormous. There were some that were colorful with flowers in the middle and trimmed in designs, then there was a hedge maze/labyrinth, then there was just a green area with this giant statue and a hill that went really far back to the Gloriette, a huge arc de triomphe thing with lots of arcs that was built in the time of Maria Theresa. Then each side of the palace was flanked with more gardens, and in the back back there was a zoo that I didn't go to, and the gardens/park went on forever in both directions and there were people running in it ( I actually saw a fair amount of runners in all the parks which is something I don't see in France), and the whole thing was soooo gorgeous.
After Schonnbrunn I took the metro to Karlsplatz where there was Karlskirche (Karl's Church). All the churches are from the 1700s, or most, and this one was pretty with two big spiral towers on either side. Then I walked over to another big park (we're still not in the Rinsgstrasse/main center area of Vienna) and I was looking for this other palace called Belevedere where there is a museum with Klimt's works including The Kiss, but all I found was an extremely long wall protecting the palace. Sort of near it was this little hidden palace called Schwarzenburg Palace and gardens, with an ugly parking lot in front, but I didn't really go in. The palace's center was like a convux bowl shape and really unornamented, a strange style. In front of it but separate was this big fountain and a monument/arch which looked like a war monument but it was in Russian, I have no idea. Then I walked over to Nachsmarket which is this strip of outdoor market that was hopping and there were people selling fresh fruits of all sorts (dragonfruit, a pink purple fruit with green spikes on the outside) and jackfruit (as big as a pumpkin with an inside of yellow/green/white circles, sort of like a squash), there was dried fruit in really vivied colors of green and red and yellow and orange, fresh squeezed juice, then there were fish stands, meet, cheese, bakeries, break stands, candies, middle eastern stands, turkish delights, and even a little chinese store at the end. Interspersed or where the market broke up for a street to pass through there were people selling scarves and jerseys and watches like normal flea markets. Outside the main row of vendors there were also nice sit down restaurants. The dried fruit looked super good as did the breads - they have challah in Austria! although they don't call it that, its in every bakery, they also have for their normal bread a flat circle/medallion shape, it's just one big circle of bread but its flat. Also on the sidewalks around Karlsplatz there were these little yellow stars that had information about what happened there before, like little history bullet points. I walked on the spot were Franz Joseph paraded by on his coronation march, and I learned that the area used to be forests where wild boars roamed (yes, quite random fact choices). Upon returning to my very nice nice hostel, I had the room the myself and took the oportunity to shower, use the internet, and take a rejuvenating 13 hour sleep.
Day 2 - St Stephen's church. Built in the 1100s, in the process of being restored so half of it is covered up. It was impressive and imposing but the coolest part of it was when you walked a block away and looked back, the main roof is blue and yellow checkered, I've just never seen that on a church. Also around the outside there are tons of statues and scenes from the bible which just make it a mish mosh of religious significance. I tried to listen into a tour but they were all in German. Next stop: Mozarthaus, where he wrote Marriage of Figaro. Then I found this really cool shopping area that was sort of covered/ a passage inside a building, with nice shops with very chic clothing, stationery stores, and this haute couture jewelry store, I think it's called Will Keefe or something, that reminded me a lot of heremes in terms of thetypes of jewelry they sold and bangles but a little less expensive and more playful/childish designs that were very very cool. If I was not already blowing a ton of cash on the act of traveling I would buy one of those bangles for a souvenir. Arrive at Judenplatz, which was a little square with a mock gas chamber outside in the center as a memorial to the 68,000 Austrian Jews killed in the Holocaust. Around the white box there were the names of the concentration camps engraved in stone. On one of the walls on the periphery of the square there was also a plaque that said "sanctification of god" (or something like that) and then said that in this square int he 1400s there was the voluntary suicide of 200 Jews who refused to convert to Catholocism and said how Christianity (the religion, not Austria or a secular power) is sorry for its persecution of jews in austria and its intolerance and can only now ask for forgiveness form God. It was a pretty powerful plaque and I was surprised but glad to see the recognition of medieval era killings and persecution remembered, because Austria ha a very old Jewish past. I tried to get into the Jewish museum but it was closed for the sabbath (in general, I'd say that european jewry has not really evolved since its abrupt downfall in world war II, meaning the dominant sector of jewish people is still orthodox and that ignorance of non-jews, bred potentially just by a lack of interaction or the predominance of religion as identity for the majority of orthodox jews, may arguably be higher in europe than in america. I'm just thinking that the US holocaust memorial museum is open everyday, and this museum is THE jewish museum of austria. Anyways, then I walked around the haute couture shopping district some more and admired the pretty things, antiques, this adorable store for baby clothes and blankets and stuff called Mon Mignon (My cutie), and then went to a big snack place and got Sachertorte. Not as good as I thought it'd be, nor as rich. Just the top is that thick chocolate, inside it was just dry chocoalte cake, but the layer of apricot inside was good. Anyways, fudge cake is way better, but I might have just had a not so good slice. Then I went to Hohr Markt Square where there is a brigde connection two office buildings, and the bridge's face is a giant clock that has figures that move and chime every hour, and at noon all twelve figures parade in front with all the roman numerals and people move on the two windows at each side of the clock and its this big show that lasts ten minutes (it only lasts ten minutes because the figures move at a glacial pace) but it was cool, reminded me of the Astronomical clock in Prague that does the same thing, only there you have christ and skeletons popping out at you.
Onto part two of the day :the heart of Vienna, Hofburg Palace. Hofburg Palace was amazingly huge, much bigger than Schonnbrunn, but it was also in the middle of Vienna and the city and you couldn't just walk up to it and admire it from a distance. On top of the main part of the palace is this huge blue crown representing the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor. Then all around the entrances to the main lawns there are these giant statues in white marble of scenes of Roman gods and goddesses fighting the elements, or animals. Oh yeah, and there was this little part right before the main entrance with some bricks dug out form underground and they were the ruins of the ancient roman forum that was on the site nearly 2,000 years ago, they are still doing excavations and they have a museum for the Roman era of Vienna and such. I forgot- I also went to the Clock Museum earlier and saw lots of Austrian clocks- cuckoo clocks (aka Black Forest clocks), wristwatches, pocketwatches, astronomical clocks, grandfather clocks, etc etc, also these desk clocks that had a name that i forget but they were essentially boxed shaped and had a pillar on either side of the face and then a scene or a mini statue in the middle. There were also picture clocks which were really random, and at 11:00 Am they all chimed in different pitches with these bells that echoed a lot and were really really rich, warm sounds and not ting-y like you think of clocks today. Right, so back tot he Hofburg. I went to the Imperial Treasury, where I saw the crown of Emperor Rudolf II, another Holy Roman Empire crown, lots of robes with long trains and even robes from the 1100s that were more simple but still inlaid with pearls and well decorated around the sleeves, this jeweled box that was from the time of Charlemange (800), and a TON of reliquaries. I'd never even seen one reliquary before, so I was really excited, but they just kept coming. It's weird to think that reliquaries would be in the imperial treasury, even today, but they decorate this vessel/ holding piece for a part of a saint's body sooo well, jeweled, gilded, everything. There was a wall of cabinets full of reliquaries fashioned in the same style, with the head of the saint and then below it the little part of his body in a glass sphere with jewels and stuff around it. There was also a reliquary with supposdly a part of the cross of Christ. There were also lots of scepteres, a few swords, some tapestries, and some pure jewels, this huge emerald found by the Spanish in peru which is like two emerald seeds combined into a giant crystal, this huge amethyst and citron, a bowl carved out of the largets piece of agate in the world (it looks sort of like the inside of a shell, or opal), and this weird thing called the Eikhorn or something that looked like a unicorn's horn only it was probably nine feet tall. Unfortunately all the descriptions were in German so I didn't learn that much about the objects and was left int he dark in regards to the unicorn's horn. Oh yeah, there was also the cradle of Napoleon's son in one of the rooms. It was pretty clear that the Hapsburgs were rich, really really rich. Umm, after that I walked around the lawns of the palace some more, and in the middle of the main lawn with the entrance into the actual palace and not just the grounds I ran into this HUGE fair that was ridiculous, it was like National Austrian Pride day or something and all these men in military uniforms were showing kids how tanks worked and how they fired missiles and they had tanks, guns, black hawk copters, the Eurofighter plane that was like a spy plane, humvees and panzers, army tents set up everywhere, then the medical units who, inside their tents, had gross pictures of them saving people with blood everywhere and a mock set up with a dummy with his knee cut open, red stuff representing blood coming out, you could even see the bone, and a tube going into his mouth. There was also a stand for the Austrian UN Peacekeepers and pictures of what they do, the Austrian Special Commando forces and they had their backpacks and equipment out, there were some guys doing demostrations with donkeys where they harnessed them to a rolling cart and put a guy in the cart as if he was injured and wheeled him around a bunch. All the while on the ring or tents around this there were vendors playing music ( I heard runaway, mamma mia, etc) and selling everything from pretzels to cotton candy to gingerbread cookies and Austrian cakes to hot dogs (they're big in Austria!!) to beer to , I dunno, other good smelling food. And there was a tent that was an EU and me tent that gave out pamhplets of what the EU does, and it was giving out children's books to the little kids and the local paper had a tent offering subscriptions and there were tents with those little spinny wheels to get candy and it was sooo random. I asked what it was for and a guy who didn't realy speak english very well (no one in Vienna does it seems) said it was just to show what the Austrian military can do. It seemed really odd to me, some of the guys were in officer uniform with the hard cap and medals and shoulder pads and not camoshrugs and the officer uniform reminds me so much of the pics I see in textbooks from World War II - exactly the same. So the Pride Day seemed really weird to me because I can't think of the US doing anything like that, I thought of "Touch a Truck" day back in Northbrook and this was like "Touch a Tank" . Then I looked up the Austrian Military online and learned: The "Osterreichs Bundesheer" (Osterreich is how the Austrian's say Austria) has only been in existence in its current form since 1957 and in 1955 after the war Austria declared Everlasting Neutrality, so now the army just protects Austria's neutrality and assists with incountry problems (so I guess their show of might is not as..we are here we are ready to conquer...as I thought). I mean, at least it wasn't a marching show, everybody was just walking around. Anyways, it was exciting to be there. I moved on to walk around the gardens behind the palace (Buurstaag Gardens) and arrived at this museum called the Albertina and the Butterfly House, both of which I skipped and kept walking, did a little more window shopping, and arrived at the Church of the Capuchin Order, very unornamented on the outside but inside in containes the Imperial Burial Crypt with like 18 Emperors and 32 Empresses and 142 members of the Hapbsurg Royal Family in crypts. Crypts are ridiculously cool, like coffins but either bigger and made of bronze with a giant cross on the top or these monstrous creations with angels and skulls and veiled women and a cross with a dying christ on top and lions and ravens and all these symbolic references, almost like a big statue with a body inside. There were TEN rooms with these, and very little explanation as to who everyone was and what was there was in German. Maria Theresa had a double crypt with Franz Stephan that took up the entire room, and there were some crypts for kids that had died at the age of 1 which were mini crypts. I couldn't really tell who got a crypt of bronze metal with a simple cross and who got the really ornamented crypts, maybe if you were emperor or empress you got a gaudy one. Some of the more decorated crypts had at the head a pillow with two crowns (all made out of metal or stone) and I think there were two crowns one of the Hapbsurgs and one of the House of Lorraine which was a unity that occurred with the marriage of Maria Theresa and Franz Stephan, because there were no more male heirs to the Hapbsurg crown. There were also a few crpyts with a cross with two horizontal bars on it, and this is the cross of Lorraine so that makes sense (the two bars could represent either the secular power and the ecclesiastical power, or the death and then resurrection of Christ.) It's also called the Patriarchal cross, used a lot in Byzantium and Eastern European representations of the cross, adopted s the Cross of Slovakia in some weird exchange. Right, anyways, I saw the crypt of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth and their oldest son who committed suicide, and the last two crypts which were very plain were put in THIS YEAR! It was Zita (the last empress of the Austrian Empire, her husband was exiled after refusing to abdicate in 1916) and her son Carl Ludwig, who both died in 2007.
After the crypt I went and saw Sacher Hotel, whose original proprietors were the grandsons of the guy who invented the Sachertorte for the royal family, and then I walked around some, saw the Operahosue, and went to more of the gardens of Hofburg where there is the statue of Maria Theresa (in great need of cleaning) and walked over to the MuseumQuarter, which is this place built in 2001 with just a ton of museums, mostly contemporary or modern art or theatre...it's like where culture is being invented as we speak. And there's some cool shops over there, but none of the museums really interested me. Back to the hostel for a little break, then on to a free organ concert at St Peters....which was awesome!! We sat in the middle of this baroque style church with golden angels and a domed fresco ceiling and dimmed lights and listened in silence to the rich tones of the organ resound through the chamber and a solo female voice as melody in latin. It was so calming and peaceful and the ambience was perfect. It's one of those moments (actually, most here are) where I wish I could bring all my friends and family and everyone I love and share it with them.
Random stuff I forgot: Manner Store in Stephensplatz, Manner is this brand of Neopolitaners (those wafer cookies) that was the original I guess, it's like hazelnut flavored filling and the packaging is a really annoying pink color. On the food topic, Viennese chocolate = money. They have those little bonbons that are wrapped in gold and blue and red foil with the picture of Empress Elisabeth or Mozart or someone important on them and they are chocolate balls filled with nougat and pistachio flavored filling or orange or something amazingly sweet and rich, veyr delicious. And the candy stores here are really fancy and just have these sweets in fancy packaging or in the shape of a pyramid and you can buy just one for like fifty centimes. I bought a package of the Mozartkungens to take back to Aix and share. I went to the grocery store and they already had Christmas candy out and they had advent calendars and tons of chocolate but also their St. Nicholas chocolate figures are not like St Nick in his red suit lined with white fur and reindeer in the US - St Nick here is really a St., with a staff and an archbishop type hat and robes with a cross. Then you can also buy the devil in chocolate form (I definitely bought one to eat) and its a really scary devil at that, kind of half human but red with horns and an ugly black beard. When I was walking around I was thinking how cool it'd be to be here at Christmas time with all the churches and decorations...and today I saw they started putting up Christmas lights in the streets!!
Randomly, they do have red bull here in case you were wondering, they even have the Red Bull truck with that giant can on the back (I saw it parked near the hostel). And they have Starbucks!!! Even Aix doesn't have those, there were two in the main square near Hofburg Palace. Par contre, I didn't see any of those typical Viennese coffeehouses with teh newspapers on sticks for you to read. But they distribute their newspapers in these plastic bags that hang from posts on streetcorners and there' s alittle box where you insert coins and you can open the plastic bag...it's bizarre. Newspaper stands/the box that we have at home is way more efficient.
Everyone stops and waits for the little man to turn green at the crosswalk. Even if there's no cars in sight. Bizarre.
It seems like things are pretty expensive here in general, although it may just be because I've been buying souvenirs and fancy chocolates.
Tomorrow (October 26th) is the national holiday of Austria. I think that explains the military might fair today. As background, this is the day their Everlasting Neutrality was declared in 1955 (that allowed them not to be part of the Cold War, so they could have their own government, after ten years of joint occupation by the four vainquers in WWII). I'd be curious to know what exactly they do for this fairly recent holiday, and even though I get to say I was in Austria for their National Holiday (My train's at 8 AM) unfortunately I'll only get to see the early birds.
As for the title of this entry: at a souvenir store there were shirts/postcards with the ever hilarious phrase: No Kangaroo Crossing in Austria-hardeharhar. In terms of Austria proper, it seems pretty westernized, culture wise I feel at home here. The people are friendly enough, freedom seems to be a value, there's amazing shopping possibly better than in Chicago, they have good public transportation even if the metro seemed semi-empty tonight, they have kids walking around drinking beers and parents walking around with little kids (different times of the day) , some parts seem a little bland or run down nearer the outskirts but you'd find that anywhere. I know in politics they jsut elected some really rightist government, but it seems like Austria's always been to the right and I'm not sure what the repercussions of this election will be. It seems like none of the streets or posters or statues commemorate any heros post-1900 (1916 actually, if you include Franz Joseph), their pride definitely comes from the Hapsburgs and Holy Roman Empire. They do have Macdo and Burger King, not many, but they're here. And with that, I have explained all that I learned in Vienna, Austria (it's actually called Wien here). So tomorrow....the trip continues...
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