charismatic megafauna since 1985

Vienna, days 2 & 3

The three main sights, according to Rick Steves (I bet you haven’t seen me mention him before, but I’m using a lot of his stuff) in downtown Vienna are the Hofburg (of which I saw parts on my first day), Stephensdom (St. Stephen’s Church) and Staatsoper (the State Opera).

My first stop on day two was Stephensdom. Without realizing it, I’d walked into church on a Sunday, something I haven’t done in possibly a decade. They still let tourists in, but not as far as they would normally because that space was taken by people actually, y’know, at church. It’s beautiful and old, but not my favorite church so far on the trip (that would be the Marble Church in Copenhagen).

After that I followed Steves’ walking tour, down a big shopping lane and over to the State Opera house. Apparently opera is still a big deal somewhere, and that somewhere is here in Vienna. The play for the evening was Wagner’s Lohengrin, a 4.5-hour extravaganza, of which I’d only stay for the first Act and hour.

Just before the Opera house is an interesting monument, the Memorial against War and Fascism. It appears like a cubist monument, with two obelisk-shaped stones carved with freakish scenes of war and concentration camps. There’s also a smaller sculpture of a Jew cleaning the ground with the head of a toothbrush.

Most of the afternoon I spent wandering around Neue Hofburg, the new wing of the Hofburg that was build for the (later assassinated) Archduke Ferdinand. Today it houses 3 museums: the Ephesus Museum (Greek relics recovered from Ephesus), the Collection of Arms & Armor and the Collection of Ancient Musical Instruments. They let you play some of the musical instruments, and the audio guide has recordings of songs played on many of the old instruments. I hadn’t thought about that use for audio guides in a museum but they really help bring the instruments to life. The arms weren’t particularly interesting for me, but the armor definitely was. They’ve got sets for jousting, for regular fighting at tournaments, for parades and for actual battle. It’s a part of history that I’ve read about but never really experienced first-hand like I could at that part of the palace.

Another part of the Hofburg is the Hofbibliotek, now the Austrian National Library. Like our Library of Congress it holds tons of books, but unlike the inside of our Library of Congress it’s got a huge dome with a beautiful fresco painted on it. That part of the library holds books dating back to the 15th century so they don’t let you just pull the books off the shelves, but I spent more than an hour walking around and just looking at everything.

At 1530 it was time to walk back to the opera to get my standing ticket. 80 minutes before the start of the show the ticket office in the back (well, side) starts selling standing tickets for 4 Euro. That’s not much for a world-renowned opera company and world-renowned orchestra pit (the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra). After walking around for most of the day I wasn’t able to stay for the whole thing (my feet were hurting about halfway through the first Act) but just being there was an experience. They’ve got little LCD screens in front of each seat and spaced along the standing platforms that show the text of the opera signers in German (original language of the opera) or English. It was definitely helpful, since I could barely make out that they were singing words at all; I doubt I’d have been able to follow it from the singing even if it were in English.

The staging for the opera was very modern/futuristic. The opera is set in the 10th century and refers to kings and the Holy Grail and such. However, the main male characters were all dressed in suits and ties (the king in a white suit) and all the extras in black outfits you wouldn’t be surprised to see at any office in the world. You might be surprised that your whole office was dressed in black (who died? what memo did I miss?) or that they were singing in German, but not by the outfits. Instead of what I imagine were trees in the original stageplay, they had giant metal sculptures that looked like future light posts. And many people in the future sit on stools.

Today, I went back to a museum I’d tried to go to yesterday: the Albertina. It’s got a very popular Van Gogh exhibit that’s ending on the 8th of December. When I stopped by yesterday on my way to the Opera, the wait was 30-45 minutes. Today I just walked right in.

After seeing the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (from which many of the pieces here were loaned) this exhibit was a bit small. It focused more on his drawings, though, which I don’t remember much of from Amsterdam. Being nice to look at was about all I got out of it, though, since the signs by the pictures/paintings were all in German.

More interesting for me was the Austrian contemporary art. All the work in that exhibit was post-1970 (or nearly so) and I hadn’t seen or even heard of any of the artists. Not all of it was “good” (i.e. I didn’t like all of the works) but most of them were nice to look at.

After wandering around on some trams for a while, I decided that I didn’t really want to do anything else today. As I’m sure anyone who’s traveled before knows, bouncing around from place to place all the time gets tiresome. There were definitely other places I could have gone, other museums to visit, other sights to see, but I didn’t have the energy for any of that.

Instead I just came back to the hostel. I’ve been reading/e-mailing/catching up on the blogs, and it’s been great. At first I was feeling a bit guilty about it, but then I decided (realized?) that it’s my trip and vacation and I can do whatever I want.