Vienna is full of beautiful parks, beautiful flowers, and beautiful buildings
With five days in Austria we continue our odd little city hopping before meeting our bike tour in Venice. If Kiev was all about churches and Ukranian food, Vienna was about museums and parks, especially the UNESCO-cited historic center. Consistent with our three-plus weeks in Europe now, it rained pretty much every day. I think it’s distinctly possible that we’ve gotten more rain – certainly more days of rain – since flying to Paris than we’d had in the first three years of travel combined. Even so we would get patches of beautiful weather and when it was rainy there were always half a dozen museums worth going to.
Our sitting room, complete with chandelier and fresh flowers
And our hotel. Hotels in Vienna were pretty expensive, so we stayed at the Imperial, one of the grand old dames of the world. Why stay there if even normal hotels were expensive? A trick we learned in Madrid when hotels were too expensive. We used Starwood points to lower the cost to a pretty normal range. And then we could pretty much count on an upgrade to a lovely suite, which we got. So there we were right in the heart of everything with a space that practically begged us to have cocktails in our room before going out for the evening. Hell, we couldn’t afford not to stay there!
Parks. Vienna has a ton of really beautiful parks and they’re not afraid to let people use them, lie in them, enjoy them. Twice I got kicked out by the rain, but otherwise Vienna is a great city for whiling away hours in the park with a good book.
The sausage (hot dog, really) with mustard and horseradish was good but how many times can you make that your meal?
The Kunsthistorisches Museum was pretty spectacular. One section was old Roman stuff, including this room of busts. I had just finished reading a fun history of the first five Roman emperors and it was as though my book had come to life with these characters.
A bust of Aristotle
The Kunsthistorisches Museum had lots of great art, including this Caravaggio of David & Goliath
Oh, and high on the “hated it” list was T-Mobile. Even for just a few days in a country we try to get SIM cards for our phones so we can surf the web, make maps, and text while we’re out and about. The T-Mobile SIM card was kind of expensive for the five days we were going to use it, but it still made sense. Until Mark’s quit working after just three days. Couldn’t get online at all.
So he trudged back to the store where they explained that he’d texted a picture. Yes, that’s true; he took a screenshot of his Google map to show me where he was when I was going to join him in a park. They explained the while the package we’d bought included texts it didn’t include texting pictures; they cost something like €1.25. And since he didn’t have a €1.25 credit on his account they shut everything down until he paid it. Now, the normal thing to do in a situation like that is to just block the text from going out, but they let the text go out and then shut him down until he paid up.
All frustrating enough, but it gets worse. He’s willing to pay the money just to get his Internet back but the smallest “package” he can buy to cover the one picture he’d texted was €10. Right. T-Mobile lets the text go out and then is going to charge him €10 to recover the hostage. That was just too far and although he fussed a good deal, they weren’t budging. And he wasn’t paying. So T-Mobil sucks.
And Airbnb sucks too. We finally got notice about the broken bed in Paris that we didn’t break. They charged us $800 for it and, because they already have Bart & Ann’s credit card for the deposit there’s not much we can do about it.
Except for all that, though, life is good. We’re getting caught up on all the rain we’ve missed over the last three years, got lots of time in some great museums, and spend happy hour aghast over whatever it was that Donald Trump said today. We had a chance to explore a little bit of Austrian history. Did you know, for instance, that if Queen Elizabeth of England lives for five more years she still won’t have reigned as long as Emperor Franz Joseph, the guy running Austria at the outbreak of World War I? Or that his successor, Charles I, who ruled from 1916 until the empire was abolished in 1919, was beatified by Pope John Paul II. Not quite a saint yet, but well on the way. I’m not certain, but I would bet he’s the only near-saint who ever ordered the use of poison gas, as he did during the war. Mother Teresa he wasn’t, nor was he exactly the man of peace you might expect for a modern saint, but who am I to question the pope?
Vienna is parks
Vienna is great old palaces
Vienna is great art. This was from a “Monet to Picasso” exhibit, not unlike the one we saw in Genoa. Having just been in Giverny, though, I enjoyed the lily pond that much more
There’s a museum dedicated to Ephesus, the ancient Roman city in modern-day Turkey that we visited last year. This athlete is the crowning glory, though it sort of begs the question of why it’s in Vienna instead of Ephesus.
There was an exhibit of early 20th century Russian avant garde artists. This “Feast of Kings” by Patel Filinov, done in the run up to World War I, has a pretty grim sense of where the world was going.
Mark outside the MUMOK, Vienna’s modern art museum. Pretty impressive architecture, huh?
The Treasury had lots of crowns and gems and all that stuff
We passed pretty quickly through a museum of weapons and armor, including this strange guy
And finally, some old Roman guy in a series of portraits