On Tuesday I left small town Bohemia for something completely different: Vienna. I finally pulled into the train station after a 5 hour trip (not including the mountain I had to walk up to get to the train station in Cesky Krumlov) and was thrilled to hear German. How nice, after so many weeks, to understand what was going on around me! Unfortunately, when I tried to speak to people, Swahili words like "sawa" and "nipe" kept sneaking into conversation, leaving the lovely Viennese population to scratch their heads and/or judge me severely. I found the hostel very close to the train station (but pretty far from the center, as I would find out walking the 2+ miles down there several times a day) and settled in. Then I met up with the Viennese friend of a good friend from high school, who had spent a few weeks in Vienna this summer. Ella had kindly agreed to show me around while I was there, so she and I walked around the city for a while. We went up to a bar on the roof of a hotel, so that was cool (but very expensive, coming from the Czech Republic!!) and then walked into and around the Museums Quarter. We came across the world's smallest game of American football:
The field was probably ten yards, and it was incredibly bizarre (more so than regular American football). Then the players bowed, and the people watching applauded and broke into song and started marching through the city. So I'm not quite sure what we stumbled into.
After spending the evening wandering around, we grabbed dinner from a street vendor in the form of a kasekrainer, essentially a Viennese sausage made with cheese inside, served with dark bread and ketchup and mustard. Then we walked along the canal for a bit, and headed back home.
The next day, I visited the Hofburg palaces. I went into the Albertina museum, where there was an enormous Matisse exhibit, which was cool, and one on violence against innocents, depicted mostly through children and cartoon characters, which was just terrifying and disturbing. The Albertina also has some great imperial apartments, though, so I walked through those for a bit. Then I essentially circled the complex, saw all the nice buildings from the outside, and went into the Augustinerkirche, which was very pretty:
but also has this inexplicable mural of a skeleton:
I walked through the courtyard, back toward the gardens in the palace, where I turned a lovely and becoming shade of red, and then walked back up through the city to meet Ella, spotting important buildings on my way, like the Town Hall and the University. Ella and I had planned to meet near St. Stephan's cathedral, and I got there a bit early (I guess Vienna isn't quite as big as I thought?) so I went in to see the cathedral. It is huge!
But unfortunately it was almost completely damaged during World War II, so has been mostly rebuilt since the 1950s. There is still a little bit of construction going on. Ella and I went to the Naschmarkt, a huge market with spices and cheese and all kinds of hard to resist things. There we had falafel (ok not really viennese food, but we got them from the market, and besides, I ate the sausage). Then we walked to Belvedere palace, passing the Karlskirche on the way, in the south of the city, and walked around in the sun for a while there too. We headed back to Stephansplatz for coffee, and then headed home.
The next day (my last in Vienna) I started at the Wien Museum, a museum about Vienna's history. The first exhibit I saw was really cool: about how street vendors and unofficially employed people in Vienna during the 17th and 18th century were portrayed, especially by the foreign media, as being kind of the heart and soul of Vienna, and they were idealized a bit. This was compared with the actual struggle of their lives. Then I moved on to the permanent exhibit: essentially Vienna from ancient times up to the modern day. It was very interesting: I don't know much about it. I also found this shop sign on display:
All of Vienna was visible from the top of the hill, which was cool. Then we headed back toward the city center, and then home.
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