4:30 in the morning, to be precise. This was to catch the 5:20 train to Amsterdam, where I would then catch the 5:56 train to Brussels, where I would catch the 8:45 train to Brussels airport, where I could catch the 10:50 flight to Vienna.
And amazingly, everything ran on time and without a hitch. Unlike the last trip.
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Do you know what I love most about European airlines? When the drink cart comes around you can have complimentary beer. Air Canada, get on that, will ya? (On the 3 hour flight from Istanbul to Frankfurt, the cart came around multiple times; I was half-plastered by the time we landed).
We arrived in Vienna on schedule. Or, as the locals call it, Wien.
I don't know how I feel about the names of cities and countries varying from language to language. It can make things very confusing. When I told the kids here that I was going to Austria, they didn't know what I was talking about until Hans explained that I was going to "Osterreich". Lindsay made the suggestion that all places should be referred to by their native name, which makes sense to me. Write your local MP and cartographer and let's see if we can't change things for the better.
Of course, once in the airport I made a beeline for an essential pitstop, a pitstop which the Netherlands is sorely lacking.
(Tangent: should I say the Netherlands "is" lacking, or the Netherlands "are" lacking? Hmmm...)
After buying a Vienna Card, which gives us 72 hours of free transit and discounts on museums, we made our way towards the CAT (City-Airport Train) which would deliver us into the city center.
Did you know that Vienna has the ugliest, tackiest hallways of any city I've ever been in? It's uncanny, really. The walls and floors are painted with garrish neon hues and wall size posters are pasted everywhere. Every walkway looked like this.
The CAT, which takes us to...
...the subway, which would take us within a few blocks of our hotel.
Everytime I'm in a European city I think of how terrible the transit options are in North American ones.
Our station stop was "Rathaus", which is the first thing we saw when we emerged from underground.
Rathaus is the German name for the city hall. I think it's great that they keep their politicians in a building that sounds like Rat House. This is the rear of the Rathaus, and if you think it looks impressive from the back, just wait til you see the front.
First we had to find our accommodation. I had committed the narrow streets of the neighbourhood to memory, so I marched off with confidence towards the Zipser Hotel.
I bet you're thinking I'm going to get lost, aren't you?
So did Lindsay, which is why I smiled smugly when we ended up on the right doorstep with no problems.
After dealing with a coldly efficient hotel clerk (much different than the warm and friendly staff at the hotel in Istanbul), we headed off for our room. This is how the hall looked.
Apparently 3-star hotels here think it's classy when you tack up red plastic to yellow-painted walls. (??!?)
After getting settled in, we headed off exploring. First stop, Rathaus.
The building is only 130 years old. That's like a newborn for this continent.
In the picture above you can see a bunch of fencing. That's the skating park, which I was greatly looking forward to; it has two large outdoor rinks in front of the Rathaus and connects them by a long, winding ice path. It's tremendously popular with the Viennese, who come out in the evenings to skate under the city lights.
We also found out that it opens for the season 6 days after we leave. Sigh...
Next door to the Rathaus is a behemoth of a building with what looks to my untrained eye as Greek-inspired architecture. (Indeed; I find out later that the statue in front is Athena).
It's the Austrian parliament.
Notice the Rathaus tower rising in the background of the picture above. It's nice.
We set off down the road that circles the inner city center. As you walk along it's amazing how many huge buildings there are, such as the one two pictures down. I only found out what a fraction of them were built for.
Eventually you come to two gigantic buildings, which were orginally built as part of a palace complex and are now the Museums of National History and Modern Art, respectively. They are identical and sit directly across from each other, with a big statue in the middle.
Just behind those museums is the Museumsquartier, a collection of art museums. This is where our target for the afternoon, the Leopold Museum, was located.
After all that amazing architecture, this is how the Leopold looks.
I'm not even going to bother describing how mediocre and boring it was. It is exactly as interesting on the inside as it is on the outside.
Anyway, after grabbing a bite to eat we spent the rest of the evening wandering downtown Vienna, which is a great shopping district. Vienna is full of famous old coffee shops where figures such as Sigmund Freud and Leon Trotsky used to spend hours playing chess and discussing philosophy. We found one and spent an hour dicussing whether vegetarians are morally superior to the rest of us.
(I say no).
2 comments:
If you are talking about the Netherlands in a singlular, as in the land itself, than it's "is". But I am assuming you are using a synecdoche to talk about the people who are not building enough Starbucks, which they don't need. Then you would use "are"
I like the word "synecdoche". I'm going to try and use it in a sentence soon.
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