Day 7: Arrival in Vienna
Our arrival into Vienna's Westbahnhof was fairly uneventful. We were able to quickly purchase 72-hour tickets for Vienna's U-Bahn and Strassenbahn (street car) system and hop onto a train for our hotel. This was a Sunday in Vienna, a Catholic country, and the streets around our hotel were almost completely deserted. I'm sure the heat didn't help any either. The forecast temperature for Vienna was 99° that day. The high humidity ensured that we were all soaked with sweat as soon as we stepped off of the U-Bahn into the station.
As soon as we checked into our crazy, ultra-hip hotel, it was time to grab some lunch and see some of the sights. It was also time to sweat some more. The first stop on our brief sight-seeing tour was St. Stephan's Cathedral, the largest church in Vienna and the national symbol of Austria. During WWII Vienna was bombed extesively by the United States (54 separated bombing raids). The buildings next to St. Stephan's went up in flames during one of these raids. The burning embers from these buildings were blown by the wind onto the roof of the cathedral, setting it ablaze. The entire roof burned and collapsed into the cathedral below. To make matters worse, the outside of this beautiful church was scarred by gunfire as the Soviets invaded the city in 1945. After the war, the citizens of Vienna banded together to raise the money necessary to restore the cathedral roof. By 1955 the cathedral had been restored, with each citizen of Vienna symbolically owning a piece of the roof. Today, it is truely a wonder of gothic architecture.
Our second stop of the day was just as overwhelming as the first, the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History). Just imagine about 600 years of Habsburgs collecting art from all over their realm, from Spain to the Netherlands, from Italy to Bohemia and the German States, and displaying almost the entire collection in one giant building. That perfetctly describes the Austrian Museum of Art History. So, what's in there? Well, everything! Bruegel's "Wedding Party," " The Peasant Dance," and "The Massacre of the Innocents; all there! Raphael's "Madonna of the Meadow,"; she's there! Vermeer's "The Art of Painting" is there too! We stayed in the museum until they kicked us out (not an exaggeration).
Day 8: Sightseeing and a Dance Lesson
I don't even really know how to describe how amazing this day really was. It began with a guided walking tour of the old city center of Vienna and the Hofburg (Imperial Palace). The old city of Vienna was surrounded by series of defensive walls until the middle of the 19th century, when the demands of industrialization and the urbanization it brought forced Vienna to tear down it's walls so that the city could grow. The area that used to stand within the walls is simply known as the city. It is a very compact area, whose narrow street plan has not changed since the middle ages. This is the Vienna that Mozart once called home. He lived here for ten years, until his death at the age of 35. He lived in several homes in and out of the city center as his finances were always in flux (he was a notorious gambler, and not a very successful one). The biggest and best of these houses is perserved as a museum today.
After a very quick ride on the U-Bahn, we found ourselves standing in front of the summer residence of the Habsburg emperors of Austria, Schönbrunn Palace. Determined not to be outdone by their French rivals, the Habsburgs modeled Schönbrunn after the ultimate palace, Versailles. Built in the 1690s, Schönbrunn has been the host of historic events in almost every century since. In 1960 the palace played host to the first meeting between Khrushchev and Kennedy, setting the stage for the showdown over Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Standing in Schönbrunn's Hall of Mirrors, I could almost see Khruschchev uncomfortably oogling Jackie Kennedy in her Oleg Cassini gown (Google the pictures. It's every bit as creepy as it sounds.).
The next highlight of the day was a waltz lesson at one of the best dance schools in Vienna. This was fun! Our instructors started us off learning a basic box step on our own. Once everyone got the hang of it, and seemed to be able to do it without falling all over the place, we each found a partner. The shortage of females on this trip meant that some of the guys found themselves dancing with each other. I guess the learned the importance of finding a partner who leads well while dancing the woman's role. By the end of the hour-long lesson they had us waltzing and turning like pros. Well, mayby not like pros, but they got us to the point where we weren't stepping on our partner's toes.
Day 9: A Free Day in Vienna
This was my favorite day in the Austrian capital. We were free to explore any sights in Vienna that we wanted to see. This was a very difficult decision to make. Museums? Parks? Palaces? There are so many wonderful things in this old imperial capital, and we wanted to see them all!
Most of us elected to hop on the Strassenbahn to the Upper Belvedere palace to see the collection of 19th and 20th century art hanging in its galleries. The highlight of this museum, is undoubtedly "The Kiss" and other works by Vienna's own Gustav Klimt. But this gallery also contains works by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Degas, and even "Napoleon Crossing the Alps" by Jacques Louis David. Why Napoleon? Well, he married into the Habsburg family. His second wife was an Austrian princess. His son, who would have been Napoleon II, had the empire survived, lived and died here in Vienna (he was only 21 years old).
A second Strassenbahn ride took a few of us to the other side of the Ringstrasse to the University District and the home of a Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud. Since 1971, the apartment where Dr. Freud lived and the attached offices where he practiced psychoanalysis have been open as a small museum. It was here that modern psychology had it's beginings. The museum highlights Dr. Freud's life, his practice, and his flight from the Nazi. In 1938, Sigmund Freud and his family, with the help of his friend Princess Marie Bonaparte, paid the Nazi's exobitant emigration tax for Jews (equivelent to €200,000) and fled to England, where he remained for the rest of his life. The highlight of this tiny museum for me was to hear Dr. Freud describe this experience in an interview for the BBC Radio Service, the only recording of his voice ever made.
After our trip to the Freud Museum, our little group split up for lunch and to see other sights in the city of our choosing. We hit up a grocery store and had a picnic in the Hofburg Park. Then, we jumped back on the Strassenbahn for a visit to Vienna's Zentralfriedhof (Main Cemetery). This is where Beethoven, and other stars of the Habsburg Empire are burried. We didn't make it to any of those graves. Instead, we wandered through the Old Jewish section of the cemetery. Most of the once ornate and beautiful 19th and early 20th-century graves in this section are in a sad state. The state of neglect and disrepair of the Jewish cemetery stands in stark contrast to the other, very well maintained secions. This is because there is nobody left to tend these graves. No families left to care for their ancestors. Hitler carried a special hate for Austria, it's capital Vienna, and especially for the Jews of this city. The Jews of Vienna were rounded up ruthlessly, most of them shipped of for concentration camps and extermination camps in the east. Most of those who survived the war could not bring themselves to return to Vienna. Their family graves stand here as a reminder of what Austria has lost.
Our final evening in Vienna ended in a brief visit to the amusement park at the Prater, and then bed. Our wake up call for our flight home... 5:45 AM. Yuck!
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