Vienna

Vienna, land of expansive classy cafes with penguin-suited waitstaff bringing you delicate trays of tea and Sacher tortes (or Salzburger cheesecake in my case).  We spent ~3 days here, extending our stay by an extra day when we realized we hadn't quite gotten a grasp on it yet.  Vienna seemed more juicy and less conservative than Austria as a whole, but still no Berlin.

Ross [in green]: Part of the issue – a fluke of our experience, or more broadly indicative of the city's nature? the jury's out... – is that we didn't really manage to interact with many Viennese people.  Our first hosts (Warm Showers continues to produce an amazing string of generous folks) were a young Slovakian couple who work in the city but spend their weekends back home in Komárno; the second was Jeff, a French geo-physicist (among other things, he worked at CERN on the LHC) who has been in Vienna for two years, working for the UN, but had almost nothing positive to say about the Viennese and their attitudes (though he loves the architecture.)  

As he pointed out, Vienna went from being the center of the universe (during the long peak of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) to being a nowhere, basically overnight, in 1918.  So what has happened here in the last 100 years?

of course, they want you to know this right away (on a map at the city's limits). 

There were finally some signs of deviance and outbursts of art as we biked in along the river, seeing some really impressive street art and alternative work spaces.  (Just as I had been commenting that Austria didn't even seem to have any graffiti.)

this is the exterior of a co-working space

Okay, so clearly there is some artistic and cultural vibrancy here, even if it's just on the streets.  (And the oddly under-emphasized/non-beautified riverfront.)  But the weight of the past still hangs heavy.  Granted, we didn't stray terribly far from the tourist path (which did, thankfully, feel less saturated and better integrated than it had in Prague), though we got some glimpses of immigrant-heavy areas (including a nice Turkish restaurant out in the 16th district) which felt a world away from the city center.  Although we didn't actually enter any of the palaces, we did stroll around the grounds at Schönbrunn (see emu, below) and ogled the ostentatious regalia at the Schatzkammer (Imperial treasury) – really weird to think some of this overtly medieval-inspired foofery (mantles, tabards, crowns, etc.) was still being used in all seriousness as recently as a century ago.  This was especially fun for me since I've been reading Simon Winder's highly entertaining "personal" Hapsburg history, Danubia, where I learned about the dynasty's "inalienable heirlooms" (including a 6-foot long unicorn horn!) and figures like Rudolf II (whose crown, on display here, is just simply beautiful in addition to being mindbogglingly extravagant.)

A perhaps even more impressive Hapsburg legacy – and an important pilgrimage for us – is the stacked collection of paintings at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.  Literally "Art History," and definitely a trip down memory lane (and reminder of how much I've forgotten) from my art history days and in particularly Ms Lamb's tenth grade (?) AP class which is actually the only Western Art survey I ever took... this was on the cover of our textbook, and – oh look – here it is!  We were there for three hours, but I could have easily spent longer, particularly in the Breughel room.

 Crazy fancy interior of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, apparently Klimt spent time here painting.

 Loved this everyday picture of Christ's journey with Joseph passed out cold and Mary being motherly.  People, breastfeeding is historical and beautiful (and Christ-sustaining).  

Of course, all of these Renaissance masters were Italian and French and Spanish and Flemish and German – not Austrian – so none of this really tells us anything about Vienna except that the Hapsburgs were wealthy enough to gather together the best paintings – and painters – from all over the continent.

We learned about some actual Viennese art at the Leopold Museum, where the focus is on the fin-de-siécle.  The big draws are Schiele – including some townscapes of places we hd been (Cesky Krumlov and Klosterneuburg) which made them look far more bleak and foreboding than they seemed to us –  and Klimt – they don't have a huge amount of his stuff, but it surprisingly made me wish we'd had time to see more (like The Kiss, which is across town.)  I was probably most intrigued in the striking canvases and tragic story of Richard Gerstl, sort of a proto-expressionist who killed himself after the dissolution of a long affair with Arnold Schönberg's wife.  We also learned that four of the city's major artistic players – Klimt, Schiele, Otto Wagner and Koloman Moser – all died in 1918, the same year the empire ended.  After that, perhaps not surprisingly, the scene kind of flickered out and got a lot more conservative.

mumok, as seen from the Gerstl room at the Leopold

Lastly, there was Mumok, where we hoped to learn about some 20th century Viennese art – in particular, Actionism, which sounds like exactly the kind of outrageously over-the-top and provocative counter-reaction that you'd expect the city's button-up conservatism to inspire a lot more often (but, as far as we could tell, it mostly hasn't.)  Unfortunately, none of that stuff was on display when we visited; instead there was a massive four-floor retrospective of the Kenyan-born, German-based Cosima von Bonin, plus a promising but kind of scattershot and poorly explicated show of stuff from the permanent collection.

 Pudgy chick with vomit stained chest on a rocket  (COSIMA VON BONIN exhibit at Mumok, Vienna).  Kenyan modern artist, mainly doesn't want to tell you what to think about her work.  Theme that stood out to me: were fuzzy animal friends at rest, like 'off duty', drunk and unavailable to cuddle with us. Note SLOTH on the pirate bunny's feet.  

one of the curated selections from the permanent collection in "the Gift of Modernism" exhibit – in a room whose theme was nakedness and sexuality)

 Ross being arty with his camera :)  He's growing a pretty full beard.  Says that he misses his face though.

EMU! Schönbrunn Palace grounds, ~5 min walk from our first warm showers host in the city.  There was a big sign pleading with people not to feed this animal and we watched a 4 year old give it a peanut in front of his parent.  We vowed to be the kind of parents who don't let our children feed animals strange food that might kill them.

 Super Gothic church.   (Votivkirche)

 A samba orchestra performing on the street, seemed to be protesting something involving the EU and USA.  Points to anyone who can zoom in to the sign and translate it.  Caroline?  Stephen? Carl?

Our second warm showers host, the warm-hearted French nuclear physicist Jeff, took us to this flea market, very cool scene, where he bought a military uniform for his Stalin costume (he's going to a fancy dress-up party on a boat in Geneva next week).

 I bought a new hat.  It used to be a woolen military scarf (Blair!  Remember our military watches?)

 And I bought a new change purse.  Petit point embroidery is big here.  (Martha, like your necklace!)


Elsa's final flea-market score!  (I also got a sweet pocket knife)

 Art Nouveau building by Otto Wagner  Pretty botanical tiling/painting on the facade.

some more architecture, highlighted by Jeff – only five floor so it must have massively high ceilings.  on the corner is, naturally, a cafe.

here's a cafe inside a greenhouse – the palm house by the Hofburg palace

more buildings...

Stephansdom (confusing how "Dom" means "cathedral" rather than "dome")

note the two-headed Hapsburg eagle.  I love these tiled church roofs.

it was All Saints Day when we visited – big day here, all the stores were closed including the normally bustling food market next to the flea market – so we caught the tail end of a mass, complete with orchestra, choir, and some phenomenal organ music

ceiling of the nearby St. Paul church

this is Jeff's apartment building, by the way, in what is now the "hipster hood" (though the Viennese version of hipsterdom seems to be high-concept fashion boutiques, quite different from the funky gritty Berlin take on it, or the cute, design-heavy DIY Portlandia-esque version we would later encounter in Budapest.)

apparently this is where they filmed the café scene in Before Sunrise

and finally, on our way out of the city (in the fading light)... this apartment complex, designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser (ah, of course, that's where these guys get their name!), was instantly and emphatically my favorite thing about Vienna.  Playfulness has a right to practicality (and vice versa)!

as usual, as dusk fell, my camera could see it better than we actually could with our eyes 

and this is a museum he designed, nearby - definitely on the list if we ever come back here for some reason...

no stores open > no way to procure camping provisions > time for Asian buffet!

the first/only (?) marginally interesting sight on the easy and boring way from Vienna to the Slovakian border, recrossing the Danube where it's actually a little bit blue.

all-in-one handwash/dry station, with some nice pictograms...if only it actually worked

our first glimpse of the surprisingly large (and white!) city of Bratislava, rising above the cornfields

our first – but far from our last – view of the Bratislava Hrad...stay tuned for more!