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.
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