Music shaped our time in Vienna, unsurprisingly given it is commonly referred to as the City of Music. We enjoyed a self-guided walking tour of music, Wiener Wiesl - Vienna's take on Oktoberfest - a visit to the Haus der Musik, a concert at Karlskirch (St Charles' church) and relaxing at the famous Cafe Central as a pianist set the atmosphere. We didn't let attempts to find a doctor (one of whom was incredibly rude) disrupt our visit to the city. We admired the architecture (Kat would like to use the adjectives 'creamy' and 'grand' to describe the city) while on our walking tour and we also had a long visit to the Kunsthistorisch (the Art History museum).
Our self-guided walking tour was odd in that we got lost (there's only a small circle of people to blame when you are self-guided) but that this made it a bit of an adventure. There's certainly worse places to be lost than Vienna, with its windy streets, beautiful (creamy) large buildings with the exteriors decorated with such complete and marvelous sculptures and characters. Places that were home to Salieri, Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss. The place had a feeling of completeness to it.
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| Passed this on the way to Old Town |
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| Grand old Vienna |
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| At Stephansplatz |
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| The approach to the Hofburg palace |
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| Hofburg |
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| Controversial Holocaust monument |
On our walking lunchbreak we found a tiny little place serving what the internet tells me is Fleischkäsesemmel. Sort of like a meatloaf on a simple semmel roll, we thought it was delicious, but the meal was made more enjoyable for the recognisable characters drawn on the wall enjoying their own Fleischkäsesemmel.
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| Entertaining artwork depicting many recognisable characters munching on Fleischkäse |
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| More celebration of Fleischkäse |
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| Love and bunnies outside the Opera (note the pedestrian traffic light!) |
We found ourselves in Austria in early October, and Kat spotted a sign advertising the local version of Oktoberfest, Wiener Wiesl. It was great we could experience this particular Austrian cultural experience. This meant that I could enjoy a beer and together we could experience the now global sensation that is Oktoberfest. Wiener Wiesl is a celebration of autumn that brings people together in with traditional food, music, clothes and drink. Although the young'uns probably come out at night, this is not just a weekend bender activity that it might be elsewhere in the world but a celebration for all ages and it is on all through the week with free entry during the day.
We sang and swayed along to songs we had no hope of understanding while enjoying the performance of the band and the happy people who came to dance and eat together. By mid-afternoon it was a swinging party and we were quite out of place in jeans and t-shirts but I've never had much of a need for lederhosen before!
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| Is Oktoberfesting a verb? |
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| Starting to get a little rowdy at 2pm |
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| Beer and sunshine |
The Haus der Musik was good fun with interactive games and systems (some of which were a little 'tired' on our visit) to teach you about how we hear and process sound. There were also rooms dedicated to the great composers, sharing elements of their lives, habits, debts and works.
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| Trying the Sound of Music out on the keyboard stairs |
This visit paved the way for our night-time outing to Karlskirch, a church we had only really admired from afar in our first few days. We bought our ticket on the day from the venue itself (we had a bit of a run-in with a pushy street vendor who was too eager to encourage us to buy tickets from him). A grand building with a beautiful dome framed by two towers, brilliantly lit up by night, the church was undergoing some maintenance inside and out but not so much that we could not enjoy both the concert and the art all around us. We enjoyed a lovely performance in a beautiful church of some of Mozart, Beethoven and Strauss' best known works and were able to wander around before and after the performance to see the church in more detail. Highly recommended experience, but one of many that you could get to in Vienna, it is the City of Music, afterall.
Visiting the Kunsthistorisches was a really powerful experience. Our favourite part was the Kunstkammer exhibit. The noble families over the centuries accumulated great arts to celebrate and often demonstrate both their wealth and authority. These were stored in what was called a Kunstkammer, like a special art room. Sometimes they were collections of brass sculptures, portraits, and tapestries but only the imagination can prevent you from thinking about what they had in there; mounted nobles with interchangable heads, over-the-top table centrepieces, drinking horns, clockwork frigates and clocks that surprise you with a mooning bum instead of a cuckoo-bird. Perhaps one of the grandest features was a backgammon set that laid out the dynastic and territorial claims of the Habsburgs, Maximilian I's descendants (Charles V & Ferdinand I), demonstrating their right to rule but also their wealth. In odd timing, a joke that would have flown past me before made me laugh out loud, through our slight addiction to the show Downton Abbey, a reference came up when the Dowager Countess said "I used to think that Mary's beau was a mésalliance, but compared to this, he's practically a Hapsburg." (The "p" is the Anglicised version). The collection at Kunsthistorisches was big, and it was a kind of fun to see what they collected, what they gave as gifts; it gives you a bit of an idea of the wealth these people once had to throw around.
The cafe of the Kunsthistorisches was lovely, not modern and tucked away out of sight but within the grand building itself, with a great dome rising above and beautiful marble archways on all four sides, hubbub with activity.
We finished off our stay in Vienna with coffee at the famous Cafe Central, a place those more famous than us used as a meeting point long ago; it's been around for more than 130 years. There we were treated to a pianist who came and went a few times while we indulged on Viennese cake and coffee.
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| Selection of cakes at Cafe Central |
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| The pianist at Cafe Central |
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| St Peter's Church at dusk |
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