Schloss Schönbrunn

Since Vienna was once the imperial capital of the Hapsburg Empire (during certain periods known as the Austrian Empire or Austria-Hungary), there are remnants of this imperial heritage all over the city. The most beautiful that I've seen so far has been Schloss Schönbrunn. Schloss means "palace" or "castle," and this Schönbrunn palace served as a summer residence for the royal Hapsburg family. It's somewhat removed from the center of the city, and the grounds are enormous.

The front of Schloss Schönbrunn.

We took an audio tour (meaning: our guide was a set of headphones) through the rooms of the palace, which was very interesting. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take any pictures inside. Probably the most famous inhabitant of the palace was Maria Theresa, who ruled the empire in the 18th century. Many of the rooms in the palace were designed by/for her, and she was also responsible for the building of many of the structures on the grounds and in the gardens of the palace, which you'll see in a bit. But she was basically a beast: not only did her reign span 40 years, she also had 16 children (one of them was Marie Antoinette)! Another famous (at least for Austrians) inhabitant of the palace was Empress Elisabeth, affectionately nicknamed "Sisi." I had never heard of her before I came to Austria, and I feel like most Americans don't know anything about her (but maybe I'm wrong about this?), but she is an icon here, sort of a Princess Diana-like figure. She was married to Franz Joseph I, whom she didn't seem to like very much (it was an arranged marriage), and was stabbed to death in Geneva at age 60.. recipe for a tragic figure, I suppose? Even though she didn't have much power or do much at all, people are obsessed. There are books and movies and shows about her, and there's even a Sisi Museum here in Vienna.

After the tour, we walked around to the back side of the palace and explored the grounds. A huge rectangular garden (which I'm sure is much prettier in the warmer spring and summer) stretches back from behind the palace and ends with a large fountain. At the fountain the landscape begins to climb, and this hill is crowned by the "Gloriette," a big stone veranda-like structure.

View from the back.

View from behind the fountain.

View from the middle of the hill.

The Gloriette.

Under the roof of the Gloriette. Great view of the palace and the city from here.

Scattered throughout the palace grounds were many other smaller gardens and structures and monuments to be discovered, like the "Roman Ruin" in the picture below.

Interesting obelisk + fountain.

Close-up of some mysterious creature.

A Night at the Staatsoper.

Last night I went to the Staatsoper (state opera house) to see the ballet "Don Quixote." The opera house itself is a very cool building, located right in the heart of Vienna.

80 minutes before the start of each performance, the ticket office for "Stehplätze" (standing places) opens. There are three different categories of Stehplätze, and the tickets cost either 3 or 4 euro. 3 or 4 euro! To see a ballet at the Wiener Staatsoper, one of the most famous opera houses in the world! Inside the front entrance, I really liked the tiled floors.

The performance was beautiful. Although there wasn't really much of a plot to follow (it was really only loosely based on the book, and Don Quixote was a pretty minor character), it was all about the aesthetics. The dancing and costumes were very Spanish-/Flamenco-inspired, and it was very entertaining and impressive to watch. So entertaining that I didn't at all mind standing for almost 3 hours straight. Here are pictures of the performance hall.

View from our Stehplätze. Not too shabby.

After the first and second acts, there were intermissions. During the first intermission, we walked around and saw the different rooms. In the room in the picture below, they sell (pricey!) drinks and snacks at a little bar, and everyone stands around and eats and socializes. The variation in dress was really interesting. There were older women in gowns accompanied by men in nice suits (although I don't think I saw any tuxes.. I'm sure they were there, though), and at the same time people in jeans and T-shirts (mostly tourists). My roommate insisted on wearing jeans, because someone told her that it didn't matter how you dressed, but it just seemed a little disrespectful to me to make no effort whatsoever to look nice. I mean, it's the opera.. in Vienna! Obviously no one is going to kick you out if you're not dressed nicely enough, but for me, that's not really the point. The opera is a long tradition that has a special place in Vienna, and I think that deserves some respect.

I have to say that my night at the Staatsoper has been one of the coolest things I've experienced so far in Vienna, and I can't wait to see another performance there, maybe an opera next time.

Melk Abbey

Last Friday a special visitor and I traveled to the town of Melk to see Melk Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that has been around for over 1000 years. It was first a residence of the Babenberg family, and since 1089 it has been a Benedictine monastery. The present structure was built in the Baroque style between 1702 and 1736 by Jacob Prandtauer (all this historical information is coming from the little brochure we got at the abbey, not from my head). But anyway, it was amazing. It was very easy to get there from Vienna, only a little over an hour on the train. And we bought a ticket called the "Einfach-Raus" ("Easily/Simply-Out") ticket, which was 28 euros for the both of us for the whole day, so it was a pretty good deal. But the Einfach-Raus ticket is especially cool, because you can have up to 5 people on the same ticket, and it's just a flat price of 28 euros for transportation on all the regional and regional express trains around Vienna for the whole day, so it only ends up being a little over 5 euros per person if you have 5 people! So anyway, we arrived at the Melk train station, and we saw the abbey immediately as we were pulling in, which was pretty exciting. The abbey is on top of a big hill that towers over the tiny little town. The weather could not have been more perfect. The sky was perfectly blue, with puffy white clouds, and the contrast of the deep golden yellow of the abbey walls against the sky was beautiful. I wore a heavy jacket there, but it turned out to be unnecessary, since I was perfectly warm in just my light sweater.

View of the side of the abbey from Melk's town center.

View of the front of the abbey from along the water (a branch of the Danube).

To get to the abbey, we hiked up to the top of the big hill. We walked through the entrance (below) and through two courtyards until we reached the visitors' center, where we found out that there would be a tour in about an hour. We explored the grounds and the town a little bit until then.

View over the gardens of the abbey.

Courtyard within the abbey.

Since it's not yet the busy tourist season for the abbey (that's in the summer), we had a very small tour group of only four people. For the first part of the tour, we walked through the former Imperial Rooms, which have been converted into a museum. There are many extremely old relics and objects on display there, like the chest with the extensive lock system in the picture below. Other examples of the objects on display are: a pocket-sized hand-written "travel" prayer book in Latin (so you know it's old..), priest garments weaved with gold (one of which, if I remember correctly, weighed close to 50 pounds because of all the gold), a golden cross with "a real piece of wood from the cross of Jesus" inside. It was all very interesting and fun to see.

Staircase inside the entrance.

Old chest with an unbelievably complex system of locks. The key that you can see hanging down in the middle turns every single one of the locks in the network to unlock the chest. It felt like something you would only see in a movie.

After walking through the museum, we entered the Marmorsaal, or Marble Hall. This part of the abbey was designed with the royal family in mind. When they would travel between Salzburg and Vienna, which was about a day's journey, Melk was often their rest stop. They had gatherings and dinners in the Marble Hall. The big metal grate in the center of the floor was where the heating came from.

Marmorsaal.

Ceiling painting in the Marmorsaal.

From the Marble Hall we exited onto a balcony, which gave us a really great view of the town of Melk and of the church at the abbey.

In front of the church.

View over Melk.

The next part of the tour was through the library, where they keep tons and tons of books. The oldest book in the collection, which was lying open in a glass display class so that we could see the pages, was 1100 years old. It was pretty cool. There were two levels of shelves and shelves of books, and we only saw 2 of the 8 or 9 rooms that make up the library.

The library, with our tour guide on the right and one of our fellow tourists on the left.

Cool giant globe in the library.

To get to the church, the last part of the tour, we walked down a spiral staircase, which had a mirror at the bottom, so that it gave the illusion of being never-ending. The church was one of the most ornate and impressive things I have ever seen. I can say with a good amount of certainty that I have never seen so much gold in one place in my whole life. All of the statues, balconies, ornamentation, etc. was covered in gold. There was not an inch of ceiling space that was not painted. I would say that a visit to Melk is a must if one is in Vienna.

Spiral staircase.

Main altar of the church.

The painted dome and vaulted ceilings.

Budapest

Two weekends ago, I took a little trip to Budapest. My friend, who's studying in Copenhagen this semester, was visiting Budapest, which is only about two hours and 40 minutes away from Vienna by train. I took the "Railjet" train, which was very quick and nice. I got into Budapest at around 5 PM on Saturday, and my friend was waiting for me outside the station. We took the subway to get back to her hotel, which was an interesting experience. To my surprise, Hungary isn't on the Euro, but rather the "forint" (abbreviation "ft"). The exchange rate is about 200 ft to 1 dollar, so it was weird to see my friend paying for things that cost thousands of ft, which amounted to almost nothing really. But thankfully, they accepted Euros in some places.. maybe they're in the process of trying to phase the Euro in, which would make sense considering that Hungary is a fairly recent addition to the European Union. Speaking of money, Budapest is extremely cheap. My friend and her friend from the program in Copenhagen were staying in this very nice hotel that would definitely have been pretty expensive in any other city, with very nice new rooms and a buffet breakfast every morning, and it only cost them about 30 dollars each per night. But back to the subways. They were pretty strange. First of all, the escalators were extremely steep and fast-moving. And they went really deep into the ground, kind of like the escalators for the Metro in Washington, DC. But really, they moved so fast that it almost brought back my childhood fear of escalators, and I really had to concentrate to get my step-timing right.

Then there were the subway trains themselves. On the outside, they looked super old and kind of run-down and shabby. They were pretty small with curved roofs, and brightly colored. On the inside, it almost looked like a movie set. The seats were only along the edge of the car facing inward; the cars were brightly lit, with lots of lights, and the silver shone very brightly. It's hard to explain, but I felt like I was in some old-fashioned movie on those trains.

Right away, Budapest felt very different to me, far more different from home than any city I've visited. That may seem strange, but maybe it had a lot to do with the language. All the signs in the subways and on the streets were in Hungarian, and I don't have the slightest clue how the Hungarian language works. Even with Italian, we're familiar in the United States with some key phrases and, of course, names of dishes, but Hungarian was something utterly foreign to me. Also, I guess that in Vienna and other European cities I've visited, the countries have fairly similar standards of living and are similarly technologized (if that's a word) to the United States. But Budapest is a noticably less affluent and less advanced (technology-wise) city, which sometimes made it feel like I had gone back in time. The city is absolutely beautiful. Apparently, it is sometimes referred to as the "Paris of Central Europe." I've never been to Paris, but I could believe it. My friend that I was visiting has been to Paris, and she said that the only thing that made Budapest not quite as stunning was that many of the buildings are just a lot dirtier. With most of them, you could tell that they're very pretty buildings, but they just aren't taken care of too well. Actually, the architecture in Budapest reminded me a lot of Vienna, mainly the apartment buildings in uniform (height-wise) rows of about 5 or 6 stories, but with varying colors, usually lighter (like the yellow, cream, and white that you can see in the picture below).

At the end of this street is the Parliament building, which was very impressive and unique, but you'll see more of that a little later. I only stayed in Budapest for one night, so I really didn't get to learn much in-depth information about the city, but I was able to walk around and explore on my own for a while, which was cool. On Saturday night, my friend had booked a river cruise on the Danube, with a company called Legenda. This was our boat:

We were pretty late getting onto the boat, so there weren't really any seats left. There was an audio guide, with headphones for every seat, but some of them weren't working (and the audio guide was pretty weird) so we ended up just going out on the deck and taking in the scenery. We saw some pretty cool things from the river.

The Chain Bridge.

The Royal Palace.

The Parliament.

It was interesting to see the way that Budapest is arranged along the Danube River. The river is a very central landmark in the city, dividing Buda on one side from Pest (pronounced "Pesht") on the other. So Budapest is the combination of two areas on separates sides of the river called Buda and Pest. Most of the sights and main buildings are on the Pest side. But taking the cruise along the river, you really see how the city is somewhat centered around the river, with all the big monuments and buildings prominently visible over the water. In Vienna, which also lies on the Danube, this is not the case. The Danube (in German, "der Donau") does not occupy a central location in the layout of the city, and it's definitely not a place to go to "see the sights." There is a canal that branches off of the Danube, but that also is pretty minor and un-noteworthy. It's just an interesting difference to me, and makes me wonder why Vienna isn't laid out along the Danube like Budapest is. I suppose it could be because of flooding. But anyway, after the river cruise, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant.. in other words, I did not try any traditional Hungarian cuisine, although certain traditional Hungarian dishes like Paprika Chicken and Goulasch are supposed to be very good. The next day, we got up early because my friend had to catch an early flight back to Copenhagen, and so I wandered around Budapest by myself until I took the train back to Vienna at around 11. I walked along the river, walked back and forth on the Chain Bridge, and then walked down to the Parliament building. Here's some of what I saw:

The Chain Bridge.

The Parliament.

All around the city, there are these metal statues. I would try to describe them, but they are seemingly very random, often depicting commonplace people (many of them old-fashioned as well) partaking in pretty ordinary activities. I must have seen at least 10 of them in various locations scattered around the city, and I didn't even see too much of Budapest. Apparently, this policeman statue is pretty famous. And I liked this statue of the boy sitting on the railing. I tried to do some research to get more information about these statues, but I was unsuccessful.