The Right Side of the Road: Vienna

Soundtrack: Braids—Native Speaker
Best Moment(s): Viennese opera for free... on an outdoor screen.

Unfortunately it has to be said that Vienna was the city I enjoyed the least on my trip. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, just that the onset of a cold and grey, drizzly weather made it a little less fun than the rest.

I arrived in from Prague in the early afternoon and forced myself to go exploring even though I felt like garbage using the "when am I ever going to be in Vienna again?" mentality as motivation. Feeling down in the dumps, I knew there was one thing that would cheer me up—vinyl hunting. I ended up at Substance records and though they had a very, very good selection (including lots of CanCon), the prices were a little out of my budget. I asked about some local Vienna/Austrian bands, but as with Berlin, they all sang in English and, to be honest, most of them weren't very good. It wasn't a complete loss—I walked away with the Austrian version of the Radiohead newspaper for King of Limbs. Sure, I'm not a huge fan and they're from the UK, but I thought it was neat. Now I just need to learn a bit more German to understand it.

I woke up feeling much better and headed for Schonbrunn, the summer home of the Hapsburgs. I didn't venture inside because a. I didn't feel like looking at fancy furniture and general extravagance for a couple of hours and b. it was expensive. Instead I wandered the expansive gardens, which amongst other things houses a full-on zoo and the oldest one in the world at that.

Schonbrunn from the front. 

Neptune Fountain in the palace gardens. 

View from the hill of the Great Parterre. 

The afternoon was spent exploring the city centre.

Parliament. 

Yet another man punching a horse in the face. 

Montreal is never really too far away... 

Believe it or not, this is an ad for a furniture store. 

St. Stephen's. Yet another church under construction. 

Hofburg Palace. The central Hapsburg residence. This place was so massive that I kept accidentally stumbling upon it when I thought I was in another part of the city. It's got some pretty intimidating sculptures out front (below). 

Rathaus in the background. 

Surprise! The city is really beautiful. I wasn't expecting any different.

Opera and Vienna kind of go hand-in-hand and it just so happened that Anna Bolena (I don't feel the need to translate that into English) was playing that evening. There were cheap seats available, but I didn't want to stand in line and opted to take in the opera on the big screen outside the theatre. I appreciate opera, but don't really enjoy it or understand it all that much. Lots of drawn-out, melodramatic singing about things that aren't all that interesting. Billy Connolly says it nicely:

Anyway, it was still a neat thing to do, and even though the Opera was in Italian with German subtitles, I knew the story of Anne Boleyn well enough to follow the plot. I also knew it well enough to know that I didn't need to hang around to figure out how it ends.

(This goes missing)

There were probably about 200 people taking it in under the Viennese sky and I felt super cultured. Not a bad way to end my short Austrian sojourn.

Lacking a witty caption.

The Right Side of the Road: Prague

Seeing as it was a month between my last two entries, it's safe to say I've fallen behind with this blog—there's just been so much going on! So, in an effort to catch up, the rest of my travels are going to be (mostly) abridged versions. I'm going for a quality vs. quantity vs. "time it takes me to write them" thing here.

Prague.

Soundtrack: tUnE-yArDs—w h o k i l l
Best Moment(s): Wandering through Old Town, New Town, and Charles Bridge at dawn.

I'm not a morning person, but one thing every single guidebook I read told me to do was try and get to Charles Bridge at dawn free from the throngs of tourists. It sounded great, but I figured I'd never wake up in time. (Un)Fortunately for me, I was woken up at 6 am by some of the worst snoring I've ever heard in my life, not from one, but two of my hostel roommates. Yes, it was synchronized snoring. Graphed it would be a sine and cosine wave: one ever so slightly behind the other in the inhale/exhale sequence (taking the ascending half of the wave as the inhale and the descending half as the exhale). My passive aggressive method of coughing loudly and not-so-gently rattling the bed frame proved futile and I knew there was no way I could sleep through it, so I looked at it as a blessing in disguise and took to the streets of Prague earlier than I'd been up in a long time.

It was really strange seeing the streets this empty having wandered around the Old Town Square at midday the day before (amidst the throngs of tourists the guidebook(s) suggested avoiding) and a little eerie (28 Days Later-esque). It was like I had Prague to myself for a bit. I shouldn't say the streets were completely empty, though, as I saw some people spilling, quite literally, out of clubs (it was 6 a.m. after all) as well as an army of street cleaners. Prague is clean, and now I know why. It was incredibly quiet, something I've come to appreciate having sirens whiz by my flat in Edinburgh at all hours of the day/night. I also got some of the best pictures of my entire trip, precisely because there were no people to mess them up.

Jan Hus (of Hussite fame) memorial.

Clock Tower and Old Town Hall. If you look closely you can see the red facade ends somewhat abruptly on the right hand side, which is where a bomb landed during the last days of WWII. Prague received minimal damage but it didn't escape unscathed.

Astronomical Clock. A really overrated tourist attraction, but it does ring in 7/8 time, if anyone cares.

Old Town Square with Our Lady of Tyn on the right. The right tower is unintentionally slightly bigger than the left.

Charles Bridge looking towards New Town and Prague Castle.

Sunrise over Old Town. A trip highlight for sure.

John Lennon Memorial Wall in New Town.

You'd think having such an awesome early morning experience would encourage me to get up more often, but (spoiler alert) it didn't.

Special mention goes to Art Hole Hostel, which I can safely say was the best place I stayed on my entire semester abroad (barring South Clerk Street of course). Great location, great price, great staff, great rooms. Great!

Other fun Prague facts:

• The lights that illuminate the castle at night are old Rolling Stones touring lights, donated by Mick Jagger
• The president had Frank Zappa play a gig to celebrate emancipation from Soviet rule. They kept one Soviet soldier behind to be flown out from the stage as he performed.
• Czechs drink and smoke the most alcohol and marijuana in all of Europe. Take that Amsterdam!

Other fun Prague photos:

Opera house where Mozart premiered Don Giovanni. 

Franz Kafka statue. 

Clocks on the Old New Synagogue, one Hebrew, one Christian. It's also the oldest active synagogue in Europe.