Vienna

Day 431 (September 2, 2019) – Vienna, Austria

One of the first things we did in Vienna after checking into our apartment was going on a walk around the neighborhood. Vienna felt like a much more regal and higher-class city than most. The neighborhood around us was set up in a perfect grid of one-way streets with imposing four and five story buildings filling all the available real estate. In typical European fashion, each building was a different color than the next and each had their own unique stonework or elaborate window trimmings. Blue trams and buses ran up and down most streets.

We found ourselves at the most interesting beer garden for dinner that night. The entire area of the city was filled with tall residential buildings, but there was a small area of town where there were no high-rises to be found. Instead, the land was cut up into the smallest little plots of land you could imagine. In each plot there was a teeny tiny house and a carefully tended garden, with all sorts of colorful flowers and fanciful trees bursting out and around the fences and privacy bushes that surrounded each property. Many of these mini-estates even had small in-ground swimming pools where people were taking a dip to cool off in the summer heat. The whole area was a small oasis of nature in the middle of the huge city of Vienna. 

Dinner at a Viennese beer garden. 

In the center of all this was a beer garden called Zukunft auf der Schmelz, which was packed with people, along with their kids and pets, all enjoying the early evening under the shade provided by a forest of enormous trees. The menu was all in German, so we weren’t entirely sure what we were ordering, but we both ordered salads in an effort to get something healthy. Mine turned out to be an actual salad with lettuce and vegetables, but Travis ended up with fried chicken schnitzel pieces on top of potato salad. It wasn’t the green leafy salad he was expecting, but I also didn’t hear any complaints. We enjoyed the great food and beer and when it started getting dark, we walked back home through the maze of gardens and little houses back to our apartment. It was a really unique and interesting experience on our first night and a great introduction to Vienna.

Some of the streets around Vienna.

The next day was our big walking day. We left our apartment in the morning with the intention of seeing as much of Vienna as we could by foot. The first thing we did was stop at a bakery to pick up something to eat. We ended up with a huge slice of cheese pie. I couldn’t believe how big this thing was. It was only a couple Euros, so we expected a small piece, but the baker cut off a quarter of the pie and handed it to us. It was greasy, but delicious and filling and I’m certain that it was also our cheapest meal in Vienna too.

Cheese pie for breakfast.

The Vienna Museum of Natural History.

Vienna is scattered with impressive statues and cool architecture.

Our walk took us through the museum quarter, past the Hofburg Palace, and to the Vienna State Opera building. The architecture all around the city was exceptionally regal and stately. There seemed to be fountains on every street corner and sculptures on top of every building. The beauty of Vienna’s buildings was in the same league as Prague. It’s just a great city to walk around and explore. 

We finally gave our legs a rest in the early afternoon by stopping at a Viennese coffee house. Walking inside felt like going back in time. The waiters were wearing black suits with long tailcoats, crystal chandeliers hung from the ceiling, a well-worn patterned couch wrapped around the entire coffee house, and there was a tall glass display box in the center containing plates of desert. Newspapers were strewn about the tables and people were chatting with one another or reading books.

While we could have spent hours relaxing inside the coffee house, we pressed on and visited the area around Saint Stephen’s Cathedral. The cathedral has a striking roof tiled in a pattern with black, white, green, and gold shingles. For a small fee we were able to climb up the bell tower. It was quite the hike to the top, but the views across Vienna were great. We stayed up there for a bit too long, taking way too many pictures before heading back home. 

St. Stephen's Cathedral.

The view from the top of St. Stephen's Cathedral.

At dinner time we visited another local beer garden to get Viennese schnitzel. It was very tasty, but I don’t think it was much different than the schnitzel we had been getting in Germany or the Czech Republic, but we never went wrong with a dinner of schnitzel and beer.

We woke up on Sunday morning to a prediction of afternoon rains so it was perfect for visiting some museums. Vienna seemed to have over a hundred museums. Picking one was a challenge, but our first stop was the Museum of Art History. This was, hands down, one of the best museums we’ve been to on our trip. I generally prefer paintings and sculptures, so this museum was a perfect fit for my tastes. The collection was impressive, spanning centuries of art, but what sent it over the top was the building itself. Not only was the building beautiful to walk around, but they had gone to the effort to ornately decorate the exhibit rooms to match the art that was on display. For example, there was a huge display of Egyptian art, complete with sarcophagi and stone tablet hieroglyphs, but the theme of the hieroglyphs was continued on all the walls and ceilings of the display rooms. There was so much to look at and take in you could spend an hour walking around any single room trying to see everything. The museum is definitely worth a return trip if we ever make it back to Vienna. 

It was beautiful out on our walk to the museum in the morning, but the nice weather didn't last too long.

Inside the Museum of Art History building.

A room filled with Egyptian artifacts. The artistic style of the artifacts is continued up the sides and on the ceiling of the room. 

A few of the paintings that I liked... Medusa by Peter Paul Rubens

The Fall of the Rebel Angels by Luca Giordano

Art and Curio Cabinet by Joos de Momper II

The second museum we visited was the Museum of Military History, which had free entrance for the day. This museum was packed with information and, to be honest, it was a little too late in the day for us to properly absorb it all. The most interesting piece on display was the car and the clothing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand from the day he was assassinated, which was one of the factors that contributed to the beginning of World War I. We saw the bullet holes in the car and the blood stains on his clothing. Perhaps it’s a bit morbid, but it was a strange feeling to see these physical pieces of history right in front of us.

The Vienna Museum of Military History.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand's car that he was riding in when assassinated.

You can still see the bullet holes in it.

And the stains on his clothing.

We spent the afternoon of our last day in Vienna exploring Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Habsburg rulers. This place was seriously huge. There are over a thousand rooms in the palace and we took a tour through about a hundred of them. The rooms were decorated as one might expect for a palace. Over the top with decoration, gold leaf, chandeliers, paintings, artwork, and carved wood detailing. There were even hidden walkways behind walls for staff to get around the house and tend to the wood stoves without having to be seen by the palace’s residents. We spent a long time walking around the extensive gardens too, home to manicured trees, beds of landscaped flowers, and elaborate fountains.

Schönbrunn Palace. It's almost too large to fit in a single photo.

Photo's weren't allowed inside the palace, but we could take them out in the gardens.

On our way home from Schönbrunn Palace we picked up some groceries from the store to make dinner back at our apartment. The tickets for the palace tour were a bit pricey so we ate a home that night to help balance our budget out. I was glad we stopped in Vienna for a few days because it turned out to be one of the nicest cities we’ve seen in Europe. It was very walkable and the art and architecture all around the city was some of the most impressive we’ve seen. There was no shortage of museums, restaurants, and coffee shops to visit and we’d need a lot more time (and perhaps a bit more money) to explore them all.

Shopping for breakfast essentials: instant coffee and powdered creamer. I splurged in Vienna and even got some orange juice.