Jan 20: Seavas Pfiati, Wien

Exploring a city in a weekend is a bit of an artform: you trawl the internet and guide books for museums and attractions and then begin the difficult task of prioritizing and scheduling them, factoring in such considerations as price, opening hours, location, time of year...

A successful formula is one that mixes in time to wander the streets, see the big attractions, visit a few good museums, eat a good meal, and experience something unique or renowned to the city.

We woke up on our final morning in Vienna knowing we had a big decision on our hands. We had basically two hours of sight-seeing time, enough to do one museum properly. Which should it be?

We whittled it down to the Fine Arts Museum and the Museum of Natural History. I decided that the best bet would be to do the Fine Arts Museum, because you can go to a science museum in any city, right? But every art museum is attuned to its local culture, or at least the good ones are. Right?

Well, the opening hours vetoed my decision. Natural History opened at 9 while Fine Arts didn't open til 10. That was that.

I took some pictures of things along the way.

Here are some trams.



Here's an older tram.



Here's a tram and some cars.



Here's a house on top of a building.



You may remember from the first post that the Natural History Museums is one of the two huge identical buildings that face each other, with a statue in between.



Handy tip: you can tell which one is the Natural History Museum by looking for the elephant.



The NHM was interesting and had a LOT of taxidermied animals, but was really nothing unique or special except for the fact that many of the displays had no english text.

The most interesting piece was this one, which came in the middle of one of the mammal exhibits. We surmised that they must have had a few leftover skeletons and decided to put them all together in a display case.

I call it: Man Shows Mouse To A Monkey After Killing Some Fish



Anyway...

The rest of our trip home went pretty much as expected, which is really the most you can hope for when travelling by air.

Vienna was a nice city, but I think we both agreed it wasn't as exciting or fascinating a trip as seeing Istanbul was. But it's not only because Istanbul has such a different culture; its people were also more vibrant and warm (sometimes a little TOO warm). In Vienna, you had the feeling that visitors were an annoyance to be tolerated on the way towards the local Versace outlet.

With Vienna you can tell you're in a place with a deep history and a wealth of culture, but it's not as accessible or interactive as Turkey was. The city still feels like it's the throne of an imperial empire, and while it's clean and full of grand old buildings, you aren't going to have very much fun there if you aren't royalty.