So last Thursday I decided (on my own) to take a trip to Vienna, or as it's called in German, Wien. I took a bus, about a 4 hour ride through all these small villages in the countryside, passing near Brno, the second largest city here as well as some small Austrian villages. It was a really nice drive, and the Austrian countryside is filled with wind turbines which look cool as you go past them.
I checked into my hostel, Ruthensteiner, which is near a metro station, Westbanhof, definitely a convenient and quiet location. The hostel itself was really nice, very modern, clean, efficient, and best of all, very cheap. My first night my roomates were an Australian from Melbourne, 2 guys from Montreal, and a guy visiting from Berlin. Over the next few nights I was with a brother and sister from North Carolina, another couple from Australia, and then 2 girls from Pennsylvania.
When I got to Vienna, it was snowing which was odd since it had been warm in Prague for the past few weeks, and it suddenly snowed like I have never seen it snow, like huge balls of ice hailing down on you. Anyway, I just got myself acquainted with the city and walked around (for the most part of the day, it was usually nice). I found a really cool building that was turned into an acquarium, and I did a little research when I got home and found out it was built by the Nazis during WWII as an anti-aircraft defense building/bomb shelter from the Soviets. Well heres a bit a history too, Vienna was in the same situation Berlin was in during the Allied occupation, the difference was that at the Potsdam Conference (which decided how to deal with the occupied territory), there were already agreements and treaties made by the Soviets with the French, Brits, and Americans about what to do with Vienna, and surprisingly the Soviets recognized them and never overran Vienna like they did in Berlin, thus why Vienna, although still East of Prague, was spared communism (now you can understand why Czechs and Central Europeans get upset when they're referred to as "Eastern" Europe, while Vienna remains further easterward than Prague and other cities).
I stumbled upon the St. Stephans Cathedral, in Stephansplatz which is basically the center of the center, similar to Old Town Square and the Tynsky Cathedral in Prague. The Cathedral, as I have posted pictures, is huge and beautiful and the roof has a very ornate and interesting design and pattern. On the outskirts of the city is another cathedral, which I forgot the name of, that is also beautiful, but I was unable to go inside. Across from that one is the Hofburg Theater, where Mozart and the other musical masters played their scores. The Theater also has busts of the musicians on the capital of the building. Around that same area is an archway, which in my photo that I took is blurred by snow, a monument to the defeat of Napoleon. Nearby that archway is the Nationalbibliotek, a huge library with some awesome equestrian statue portraits, the two famous museums, Kunsthistoriche Museum (art history museum) and Naturalhistoriche Museum (natural history museum). I visited the Kunsthistoriche, a beautiful building in itself, but the artwork there is a goldmine of Renaissance and Baroque art, with a lot of very famous painters ranging from Caravaggio, Tintoretto, and Parmagianino, to Rembrant, Vermeer, and my favorite, Peter Paul Rubens. I spent almost the rest of the day there and I was really wiped from walking in the museum for hours.
I also visited some of the famous Viennese cafes, a ubiquitous symbol of Western culture as well as Vienna itself. My first cafe visit was to Cafe Central, where famous names such as Theodor Herzl (the 'father' of the modern Zionist movement, wrote a famous pamphlet, Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State), Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Adolf Loos (a famous Czech architect, a sort of contemporary of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was influential in the Viennese Secession style). I got a Viennese breakfast, which will sound a bit lackluster, it was a croissant (which by the way, was invented in Vienna not France, it was a victory pastry invented when the Viennese, with the aid of the Poles, fought off an Ottoman invasion in the 17th century, which explains the allusion to the Muslim crescent shape of the pastry) a roll with orange marmalade, soft boiled egg, and the best part, filter coffee, something I dearly miss from America (they only drink instant coffee here, bleh). So after my nerdy excursion to the cafe, I walked around a bit more and saw Michaelerplatz, where theres a Spanish horse training building, where they have all these shows and stuff, something I find a bit cruel to the horses, which clearly arent meant to be living in bustling cities with no space to roam...but, I digress. There are also Roman ruins nearby.
In the same square is Cafe Griensteindl, where some intellectuals such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig wrote. Although I liked Central more, this one was a bit quieter and less 'ornate.' The final cafe I visited was Landtmann, which was the spot where Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler (composer), Max Reihardt (artist) used to go. I didn't really like this one, it was too fancy, and the people working there and eating there were rude, although the torte (cake) and melange (a type of coffee drink) was amazing. I of course dont look anything posh or dressed up, so the staff assumed I stumbled in by accident =\
Some other museums I visited were the Leopold Museum, which was definitely the highlight of my trip. They have a massive collection of late 19th and early 20th century art. At the time, they highlighed Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, from the Vienesse Secession movement, Ernst Barlach, a sculptor who I had never heard of, but now love, Kathe Kollwitz, a painter/sculptor with a similar style to Barlach, among other artists. I literally saw the entire museum. On the way to Landtmann (where I visited after the Leopold), I walked by the Parliament building, which is incredible. It's a beautiful, very stately looking building. I noticed that 1918 was also the same year as Czechoslovakia to become independent after the dissolution of the Hapsburg Empire. Well, I guess I already new this from basic history of WWI, but I didn't realize it, perhaps thats why a lot of Czech artists were also featured in many of the art museums?
In the center of the city, is a square called Judenplatz, where the Jewish quarter used to be. Most of the population was wiped out during the Holocaust, but Rachel Whiteread, an international famous sculptor, won a project to do a memorial there. She did a negative cast (which means she casted the negative space of the object, not the object itself) of a library that was burned down during the Nazi years. On it are listed the names of the concentration camps the 65,000+ Austrian Jews were sent to. A few people put roses and flowers (I tried to find a stone, in the tradition of Jewish gravemarkers, but that was a futile mission considering I was in the middle of a paved paradise with no nature around for miles). Well it was a good memorial anyway.
Afterwards I took a wrong turn into a creepy alleyway that I couldnt even find on the map, but I found a really cool German restaurant. It was an old smoky cellar that was rickety and antiquated, and there was only about 3 people in there, including the owner, an old woman with a who bore a resemblance not too unlike Mama Fratelli from The Goonies, although much nicer. They didn't speak a word of English, but that made it all the more authentic, so I ordered this pork dish with saukerkraut, and dumplings. Mmmm...I can taste it. They serve pretzels too (something I forgot that Germans invented) with the meal and of course, a beer, Ottakring, the local brewery in Vienna. A side note, I was talking to an Australian who also held dual citizenship in Italy, who somehow managed to chop off half his finger in a drinking game about two weeks earlier, and he was trying to tell a bunch of us (while he was hammered) about the Schnaps tour nearby. He insisted it wasnt Schnaps that he went to, it was "Snaps," something apparently different...but of course theres no use arguing with a drunk Australian. He said you can go and try all the different flavors and drinks and you get really drunk on the tour haha.
I did however, give myself a tour of the Belvedere Palace, a palace of the Hapsburgs until the end of the dynasty. It's now a museum and looks a bit similar to Versailles, obviously not as complex and huge. It's undergoing renovation so there was some construction and scaffolding, but its still nice to see. In the back where the gardens are, is a gigantic pool and the front lawn, similar gardens, but ones with huge designs in them and giant fountains as well (which weren't functional at the time). The lower palace, towards the front, was housing a huge exhibition of Alfonso Mucha, a Czech artist that became the face of the Art Noveau period in art history at the closing the of the 19th century. The guy is amazing, and the detail and versatility of his style is crazy, but the one part of the exhibition I really enjoyed was a small collection of a much larger series of his life's work, "Slav Epic" which portrayed sort of romantically, the religious and political history of the Slavic people. At the Upper Belvedere, there was another goldmine of Baroque artwork, but also Romantic and Impressionist/Expressionist work too. They had some famous names like Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, and the centerpiece of the museum, Gustav Klimt specifically his famous painting, "The Kiss" which was behind a special glass. I tried to snatch a photo, but I was yelled at by a German lady who was apparently a security guard (a very scary experience, being yelled at in German). There was also a lot of Romantic art which was beautiful to look at as well, but they had a famous painting, an equestrian portrait of Napoleon during his campaign by Jacques Louis David.
Anyway, I'm going to leave it at that for now, I think I covered everything for the most part (spare the details, which come to mind when I'm not writing).
