Touring Vienna

August 2^nd Vienna

We’ve had a couple of good touring days in Vienna. Yesterday we walked up to St Stephen’s Cathedral and looked around. This is the cathedral where Mozart had his “pauper’s funeral” in 1791. Napoleon also posted his farewell edict on the door in 1805. It’s a huge cathedral, very ornately decorated. While we were there the organist was playing the massive pipe organ - fantastic sound.

We walked up to the Danube Canal and then back down to the Hofburg Palace Complex which was the imperial palace of the Habsburg dynasty for over 600 years. It has lots of buildings including the Spanish Riding School where they train the famous Lippizanner horses. We walked around a lot but didn’t go into any of the museums - there’s just too many.

After an afternoon rest we went back out to the Rathausplatz in front of the city hall for the food festival. It’s hard to find a table on a Sunday evening but we ended up getting seats at a table with a very nice retired Austrian couple. They knew some English so with that and the help of drawings on Post-it notes that they had, we ended up having a nice conversation, learning a little more about their life in Vienna and the Salzburg area and getting a few more sightseeing tips. It made for a very pleasant dinner.

We actually stayed up until after dark and took in the Hofburg Palace area, the Parliament, the Maria-Therisien Platz and the Opera House all lit up. Very beautiful.

After a good sleep and hotel breakfast we took the subway out to the Schonbrunn Palace. Although it’s in the city now, when it was built around 1700 (mostly) it was the summer palace for the Habsburgs. Empress Maria Theresa had a major renovation done in the late 1740s (while ruling and having 16 children) and it looks much the same now. Her son, Franz Josef I ruled for 68 years and was the last emperor to live here. The palace has 1,441 rooms and is situated on a 500 acre park. They would come here for the summer with a staff of 1,500 people.

We bought tickets to get into a self-guided (with audio guides) tour of 40 rooms where the imperial family lived. We walked through the room where Mozart gave his first concert at age 6 for Empress Maria Theresa and reportedly jumped into her lap and kissed her when he was finished. We also walked through the Main Gallery where Kennedy and Khrushchev had a meeting in 1961, when the Cold War was getting fairly hot. The whole palace is very ornate. Some of the inlaid wood floors are done in swirling patterns and there are whole walls of walnut panels. Fantastic workmanship.

The gardens are also unbelievable. There are huge areas of trees and walking paths, lots of fountains, an area with several hedge mazes, a zoo and beautiful flower gardens with huge arbours that are like tunnels that you walk through and lemon trees and all kinds of stuff. Our sister-in-law Denise and my buddy Lester would be hard to drag out of here if they ever saw it. I don’t know if we’ll get to the gardens at Versailles on this trip but this is awfully good. Before we left we went to a strudel-making demonstration in the basement of a side building. A young fraulein magically whipped up an apple strudel before our eyes. We had a free sample and got the recipe. Since the fraulein won't come home and make it for us, one of us will have to do it. This might be a problem.

It’s over 30 and sunny today so we’ve come back to get cooled off before heading out for dinner.

It's interesting that the Austrians are so environmentally conscious. They're very outdoorsy, there's very little litter and very little graffiti. This is a significant change from the big cities in Italy, which is right next door. Why there's this different mindset has mystified us.

Tomorrow we’re off to Budapest.