We woke up this morning in Vienna and started our exploration of the city with a morning bus/walking tour. From the bus we saw numerous historic buildings and the oldest Ferris wheel. We also learned that during World War II around 100,000 bombs fell on Vienna and 1/3 of the historic buildings were destroyed.
We got off the bus near the Natural History Museum and the art museum, located in two of the wings of the old Hapsburg palace complex. The extent of the buildings associated with the Hapsburgs really drives home just how powerful they were over the centuries.
Our guide took us over to St. Stephen’s Cathedral, through even more historic buildings (the upper parts of which were covered with nets to protect them from “pigeon-birds” as he said). He showed us a statue of the Holy Trinity and built to show the pious using faith to defend against the plague (represented by an ugly old woman, which is hardly fair if you ask me).
We were able to look through St. Stephen’s on our own. Melanie and I tried to check out another church, but services were going on so we couldn’t. Instead we walked up to Prince Eugene’s winter palace, then back to meet the group at the cathedral.
After lunch on the ship, we set off on our tour of Schönbrunn Palace. After a looong bus ride, during which we learned about Empress Maria Theresia and her 16 children, and her husband and his many more than 16 children (courtesy of his habit of “picking fruit from other gardens, and he picked quite a lot”). Maria Theresia was amazing—she ruled, not her husband, while being pregnant for the better part of 20 years.
For a history major, I don’t know a lot about the Hapsburgs, despite their hundreds of years of influence and habit of marrying their children to other monarchies to increase their reach and their quick decline in the early 20th century (see the title of this entry). But I really should learn more, because they sound like a fascinating family. And apparently there are still a lot of them around, although they don’t have the global influence they did before World War I.
The palace was the summer residence of the family, and is over 300 years old. It stopped being a residence in 1918, when the last Hapsburg empire stepped down. It’s a beautiful building, if stifling hot because of the lack of air conditioning and the huge numbers of visitors. The grounds are beautiful and could take hours or even days to explore. Melanie and I barely scratched the surface in the half hour we had there.
After the tour, we left the group to explore Vienna on own. We took the U Bahn to the art museum, but weren’t able to see it because it was too near closing time. So instead we went to Cafe Landtmann to take in the ambience of Freud’s coffee house and have delicious beverages and pastries. Then we walked back to St. Stephen’s and did some shopping near there before taking the U Bahn back to the ship.
We had dinner with two new (to us) couples, and one of the older men was a delight. He’d had a bunch of different jobs in his life, including cab and limo driver. As a cab driver he transported Jackie Kennedy and Jack Dempsey, and he apparently was Lauren Bacall’s regular limo driver. I could have listened to his stories forever.
We stayed so late at dinner that we missed the waltz lesson, but I did get to help a group of middle aged and older women do the Macarena.
There’s a late night snack shortly before we set sail, so I’ll sign off to go enjoy that!
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