Wien

Posted: June 12, 2013 | Author: thediaryofadork | Filed under: The Diary of a Dork: Regensburg '13 |4 Comments »

Last Friday the whole group took a trip to Salzburg. It was kind of poorly planned because we got there around 1:30 in the afternoon and the teachers were only paying/accompanying us for the train ride, so we got there and nobody knew what to do.

I’ve been to salzburg before, however, so Steph and I, after getting something to eat at a snooty cafe, eventually found our way to the old part of the city where the Dom was during the four hours that we had until our train left for Vienna that evening. We thought about going up to the old castle/musuem above the town, but we didn’t have the time or the energy to make the hike. Instead, we stopped by the statue of Mozart, took pictures around the Domplatz, saw Mozart’s birthhouse (is that a word?), and saw the same guy sitting in front of the cathedral playing guitar and selling his CDs as when I was there last, four(five?) years ago.

We also saw this really creepy statue.

We made our way back to the train station around 7pm to catch our three hour train to Vienna. We went alone; this excursion was not covered by our program fee and none of the other students joined us. One was going to, but when he found out that one train ticket cost 90 euros, he backed out. My roomate and I had planned ahead and bought Eurail passes, which allows us to travel for six days within three countries of our choosing and we will be making two more trips with our four days of remaining train travel.

We got to Vienna rather late at night and went straight to our hotel, which we had booked ahead of time and was purposely close to the train station. The next morning we ate at the overpriced hotel buffet (with the excuse that we wouldn’t stop for lunch and therefore ate as much as we could to get our money’s worth (also, they had real breakfast food like bacon and eggs, which we haven’t had for two weeks)) and decided over breakfast while pondering the city map that one day wasn’t enough time to see everything we wanted. Using the hotel’s computer, we booked another place (since staying another night at the same hotel was more expensive), checked out, dropped our bags off at the new hotel down the block, and headed for the U-bahn or subway station.

24-hour tickets for the subway in hand (which nobody checked, so we totally could have ridden the subway for free all day) we started our whirlwind tour of the city center in Wien. We started at Stephansdom, which was impressive from the outside and kind of touristy on the inside, with routes paritioned off to herd visitors on a certain path. It lacked the reverent feeling I got from both the Regensburg and the Salzburg Doms, in which people still seemed largely quiet and respectful even if they were snapping pictures. We were assaulted by ticket/event salesman outside of the Dom several times, and one of them thought I was from the Netherlands when he asked me in German if I spoke German, and I replied with “ein bisschen”. Apparently my German accent is a Dutch one?

Back to the subway we went, heading for the Hofburg Palace. It was the winter palace of the Habsburg dynasty while they ruled Austria and contained three musuems, only one of which we were allowed to take pictures of. This one was the imperial silver collection which, while impressive, was rather boring in my opinion, and I ended up with a lot of pictures of plates that I probably won’t ever look at again. The other two musuems, The Sisi Musuem and the tour of the imperial state rooms were more interesting. Kaiserin Elisabeth, or Sisi the Bavarian princess, has become a rather popular icon in Austria, but as far as I can tell, it is only because she was randomly assassinated. There have apparently been several less-than-factual films about her and she is extremely-well known in Vienna. I personally think that she is just another way for Vienna to make money off of tourists; I didn’t find her very admirable, though the history of her time period and of the rest of her family was very interesting. I’ll put up some stuff I learned about her in a later next post.

After those three musuems, for which we had audio tours, we took a break at a cafe for a little while before going down to the historisches kunst musuem, or the historical art musuem. Armed with audio guides again, we went through several exhibits of European painters from the 15-18 centuries(ish), a coin collection, Greek and Roman sculpture, and Egyptian art.Many of the paintings had been collected by a Habsburg king, who had actively sought and supported art during his rule. I enjoyed the paintings the most, as well as the Egyptian tomb exhibit.

Next, we made our way to the Viennese Opera house, stopping by a statue of Schiller along the way (a famous author some of whose works I’ve read). We couldn’t do much more than take pictures outside of the building since a performance was about to start and you weren’t allowed in without a ticket. We saw this gem in the subway station just below the opera house.

We headed back to the part of the city where our hotel was after that, getting Wienerschnitzel for dinner. I was so thirsty after walking all day that I drank an entire beer despite being rather un-fond of the taste- it’s cheaper than the mineral water they sell everywhere and waiters will sometimes not bring you anything at all if you ask for leitungs Wasser, or ‘plumbing water’.

The next morning we checked out of the hotel and stopped by the train station to reserve seats on the high speed train back to Regensburg that afternoon. I put my big bag in a locker at the train station for two Euros so I didn’t have to carry it around all day. Then we headed to Schönbrunn, the summer palace of the Habsburgs at what used to be the outskirts of the city. The tour inside of the palace had a lot to do with Sisi again and seemed different from the one I took when I was there last, which was odd. The palace grounds were gorgeous, however, and contain the Vienna Zoo as well as a large fountain of Neptune (Schönbrunn means pretty fountain).

I ditched my roomate then to go back to the city center of Vienna, going back to the opera house to find the opera musuem, which was basically one large room with some costumes and the history of the opera house and it’s management. I also took a picture at Hotel Sacher of the famous Sachertorte, but I didn’t try any because I don’t really like Sachertorte.  I took the subway to the Prater park with the big ferris wheel that is the symbol of Vienna, then got back on one stop further to see the Donau (Danube) where it flows through Vienna. Finally, I rode back to the train station to meet up with my roomate and get on the train back to Germany, which covered twice as much distance as the ride from Salzburg to Vienna and took the same amount of time as that trip due to it being a high speed train.

It was, of course, raining again in Regensburg when we arrived.

There are a lot of other things to see in Vienna that we didn’t have enough time to- more musuems, theaters, etc- but I think we did pretty good with the time we had. Everything there is rather expensive and there were a few people who had such strong dialects that I couldn’t understand a word of their German, but I had a good time even though I can’t decide if I would ever go back again.

We are going to a brewery tour in Regensburg today, so I might have another post later this afternoon about that.Til then!

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