I didn’t know that "Weiner" is German for a Viennese person. I think it’s interesting that we – and by "we," I mean ten-year-old boys – use such a similar word (with the "i" and "e" switched) as an insult. Anyway, Vienna surprised me. Everything is in German, so it’s automatically weird and foreign, but everywhere you look, there’s a McDonald’s or a Starbucks.
We went first to Stephansdom (St. Stephan's), which was under a five-minute walk from our hotel. There was this cool plaza just outside where we were staying with some big pretty statues and lots of cafés and stuff, so we walked through there to the church.
It’s really impressive, with an old Gothic design but a very different tiled roof. We went in and took the elevator to the top, where there was a pretty view of the city.
I got a quick lunch from a stand -- a frankfurter, of course. This isn't the one we actually stopped at, but:
After that, we walked to the Hundertwasser museum. I don’t think this is actually famous or anything, but Holly’s friend told her to go. It was the most bizarre building I’ve ever seen. It looked like something a kid would design, with random tiling and lots color and grass on the roof. The floors were wavy and bumpy and the art inside were paintings by this one guy, Hundertwasser, and drawings by Picasso. It was very trippy. I imagine that someone going there on shrooms would have a heart attack. Or a really amazing time. I’m not sure, having never actually done shrooms, but I feel like I have a better idea of what they must be like after going here.
I was a little thrown off in the museum by two policemen. There’s just something about men in uniform speaking German that’s kind of disconcerting.
We walked back to the hotel and a van picked us up to take us to a tour bus. The bus drove around the Ringstrasse, and the guide pointed out all of the notable things, including Belvedere Palace, the 140-year-old Opera House, Parliament, and a huge building that looked like a pretty church but was actually their town hall. We also passed a non-important street called Sterngasse, or Stern Street (Star Street, I guess), that I wish I could have snapped a picture of. The guide said Vienna is a very green city, with over 600 parks. The Ringstrasse was a cool, pretty street, and we passed some important hotels (later, I saw the Sacher Hotel, where the sacher torte was invented). The President of Syria was staying in one, and Beyonce was in town for a concert and staying in another. Unfortunately, I didn’t run into her. The President of Syria, on the other hand…
The tour bus took us to Schoenbrunn Palace, the old summer house for the royal family. When we got there, cops told us we had to wait outside for a few minutes – the President of Syria was there, and they had cleared out the place for him. He passed by in a tinted car with flags, preceded and followed by tons of cops. I tied to get a picture but couldn’t get my camera out fast enough. Oh well. It’s not like it was Obama or anything.
The palace has 1141 rooms, though we only saw about 20. The tour guide told us about Maria Theresa, the queen who had like 16 kids, and mentioned her daughter, Marie Antoinette. She said that when Marie Antoinette moved to France she was shocked to find out that the country had public births for the royal family, so she had to give birth to each of her children in front of a crowd to prove the baby was really coming from her.
We ate at some Hungarian/Austrian restaurant for dinner, though I’m not sure if what I ate was anything particular to either of those nationalities. Besides that meal, I mostly stuck to pasta in Vienna. You can’t go wrong with Italian.
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