I stayed out on the Wiener Gürtel ("Wiener Girdle"; or, some claim, "Vienna Belt road") in an Ibis, a chain with a well-earned reputation for minimal adequacy. They're working on the elevators, and it makes a noise like someone's head being pounded against a piano. Austrian elevator etiquette also seems to demand a friendly hello and goodbye to other passengers; jarring for someone from North America, where the custom is to regard other people in an elevator as your potential murderers. The vast brick neo-Gothic church of Maria vom Siege is across the road, but by Viennese standards it's apparently such a shed that no one really bothers about it.
Vienna's hectic: a Big City. Nosing around for a grocery store turns up places to practice mixed martial arts, to tango, to play Magic: The Gathering, to get psychotherapy. People on motorized razor scooters lean and weave through the crowds on Mariahilfer; just behind me, one of them ploughs into a woman who has to be helped up again.
Vienna's the repository from which the Habsburgs doled out bits of grandeur to provincial cities like Zagreb. The city centre is a palace invaded by roads. The side streets are lined with wedding-cake stucco facades, essentially all of them white. Rarely, a barely-detectable blue, or a pink like a drop of beet juice in a gallon of milk. Once or twice, one that some lunatic has painted pale green.
Marathons
Sunday turns out to be the day of the Vienna Marathon. Early in the morning, the Ibis is humming with nervous, wiry people in running caps, and the city centre is a carnival of pain and steel drumming. People on cafe patios tilt the last gulps of champagne into their mouths and watch the suffering faces bob past. Doppler-shifting Austrian ambulances hee-haw in the distance. A man with a dolly loaded with metal cases stands at the side of the road waiting for a chance to push it across. It seems like a promising situation, and once or twice he seems to be about to go for it, but he eventually frowns and wheels it away again, to general disappointment. The vast queues at the gelato places are wavering, with people seemingly just waiting for a sign to dissolve into a mob of looters -- like a frozen dessert-themed gang from The Warriors at the moment of its formation. One second, a peaceful line-up, the next people are wearing the empty tubs on their heads, acclaiming a leader, choosing a silly name.
There's a stand with a DJ, drummers, and dancers. Someone keeps breaking in to ask the crowd to make noise and to commentate on the race. The leaders have long since passed and a lot of these competitors are walking, but he's trying. "Bib 7489 is surging!... oh, no, she's stopped to take a call. That's going to cost her if 8043 gets up again."
Museums
It's not possible to see any significant proportion of Vienna's museums. Just reading a list of them is tiring. One option is to keep a few under surveillance and go to whichever ones are getting the fewest school groups. Another is to go to a small one and see what else is included under the same ticket. The Papyrus Museum, for example, turns out to include the Globes Museum and the Esperanto Museum.
The Museum Quartier is a whole complex of museums, none of which I go to. I do visit their public washroom, where a sign unembarrassedly asks your intentions: the pissoir costs 0.20, a stall 0.50 (in fact, both are in the same area; you're on the honour system). The urinal is a trough that, with the wall, forms part of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, which I guess someone found artistically satisfying. It's a design that probably asks a lot of significant aesthetic and cultural questions, but asks them at a highly inconvenient time. The attendant is multilingual and brisk, as you'd expect; this is one of the world's more prestigious museums -- she's risen to the peak of her profession.
If everything in the Fine Arts Museum (the Kunsthistorisches) were trucked away, it would still be worthwhile for the building and grounds. At the centre of the park outside is a bronze statue of Maria Theresa where, judging by the litter on Sunday morning, her admirers gather on Saturday nights to celebrate her with wine and Jagermeister, probably sloping across the road as needed to the washroom in the MQ ("how much to throw up?"; "do you do day passes?"). Inside, sumptuous rooms of paintings, antiquities, golden curiosities, and portraits of strikingly ugly people with jutting lower jaws. The Habsburgs were famous for their dynastic marriages. Their mate-selection strategy tended towards two ends: they wound up ruling much of Europe; and they began producing specimens so inbred that the Spanish line went extinct and the Austrian one developed some definite quirks.
Flak towers
Vienna has three enormous flak towers, built in response to allied bombing raids in WWII. They are gray, they are crumbling away, and their mass is incredible. Having been built to withstand heavy bombing, they proved tricky to take down again. With one, the Viennese did the obvious thing and turned it into an aquarium. Two more moulder away in the Augarten, a park, where they cast grim shadows over picnics and children's games. They are surrounded by fences that have ads for Sattel Fest ("saddle fest"; a horse show?) zip-tied to them.
Imperial Crypt
Rows of metal sarcophagi, some simple, most ornate, holding most of the remains of most of the Habsburgs. The family had a habit, though, of diplomatically parceling themselves out to different churches: hearts in one, innards in another, and what remained here. Whether this was done with an eye to future tourism revenues or not, it does mean that completionists need to buy three tickets (while the rest face a strange decision). The Imperial Crypt was enough for me. It was blazing in Vienna that day; a crypt sounded pretty good. There is a guestbook at the end, which I should have read, to find out what people write in a crypt's guestbook.
Plague column
In 1679, plague broke out in Vienna. The emperor, heroically fleeing the city, promised over his shoulder to have a monument built when the plague ended, should it end, to express gratitude for all the people it didn't kill, assuming there were going to be some. Dedicated to the Trinity, with angels of increasing rank (the short version of angelology is that disembodied heads > babies > adults) around a narrowing cone of clouds, the top covered in gold, the whole curious package wrapped in bird netting.
To sum up, nothing in particular happened in Vienna, but I saw what other tourists see, and then I described it for no clear reason. Writing blog posts is an addiction, in the sense that I feel bad when I don't do it, and then get a momentary feeling of relief when I do.
Vienna's hectic: a Big City. Nosing around for a grocery store turns up places to practice mixed martial arts, to tango, to play Magic: The Gathering, to get psychotherapy. People on motorized razor scooters lean and weave through the crowds on Mariahilfer; just behind me, one of them ploughs into a woman who has to be helped up again.
Vienna's the repository from which the Habsburgs doled out bits of grandeur to provincial cities like Zagreb. The city centre is a palace invaded by roads. The side streets are lined with wedding-cake stucco facades, essentially all of them white. Rarely, a barely-detectable blue, or a pink like a drop of beet juice in a gallon of milk. Once or twice, one that some lunatic has painted pale green.
Marathons
Sunday turns out to be the day of the Vienna Marathon. Early in the morning, the Ibis is humming with nervous, wiry people in running caps, and the city centre is a carnival of pain and steel drumming. People on cafe patios tilt the last gulps of champagne into their mouths and watch the suffering faces bob past. Doppler-shifting Austrian ambulances hee-haw in the distance. A man with a dolly loaded with metal cases stands at the side of the road waiting for a chance to push it across. It seems like a promising situation, and once or twice he seems to be about to go for it, but he eventually frowns and wheels it away again, to general disappointment. The vast queues at the gelato places are wavering, with people seemingly just waiting for a sign to dissolve into a mob of looters -- like a frozen dessert-themed gang from The Warriors at the moment of its formation. One second, a peaceful line-up, the next people are wearing the empty tubs on their heads, acclaiming a leader, choosing a silly name.
There's a stand with a DJ, drummers, and dancers. Someone keeps breaking in to ask the crowd to make noise and to commentate on the race. The leaders have long since passed and a lot of these competitors are walking, but he's trying. "Bib 7489 is surging!... oh, no, she's stopped to take a call. That's going to cost her if 8043 gets up again."
Museums
It's not possible to see any significant proportion of Vienna's museums. Just reading a list of them is tiring. One option is to keep a few under surveillance and go to whichever ones are getting the fewest school groups. Another is to go to a small one and see what else is included under the same ticket. The Papyrus Museum, for example, turns out to include the Globes Museum and the Esperanto Museum.
The Museum Quartier is a whole complex of museums, none of which I go to. I do visit their public washroom, where a sign unembarrassedly asks your intentions: the pissoir costs 0.20, a stall 0.50 (in fact, both are in the same area; you're on the honour system). The urinal is a trough that, with the wall, forms part of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, which I guess someone found artistically satisfying. It's a design that probably asks a lot of significant aesthetic and cultural questions, but asks them at a highly inconvenient time. The attendant is multilingual and brisk, as you'd expect; this is one of the world's more prestigious museums -- she's risen to the peak of her profession.
If everything in the Fine Arts Museum (the Kunsthistorisches) were trucked away, it would still be worthwhile for the building and grounds. At the centre of the park outside is a bronze statue of Maria Theresa where, judging by the litter on Sunday morning, her admirers gather on Saturday nights to celebrate her with wine and Jagermeister, probably sloping across the road as needed to the washroom in the MQ ("how much to throw up?"; "do you do day passes?"). Inside, sumptuous rooms of paintings, antiquities, golden curiosities, and portraits of strikingly ugly people with jutting lower jaws. The Habsburgs were famous for their dynastic marriages. Their mate-selection strategy tended towards two ends: they wound up ruling much of Europe; and they began producing specimens so inbred that the Spanish line went extinct and the Austrian one developed some definite quirks.
Flak towers
Vienna has three enormous flak towers, built in response to allied bombing raids in WWII. They are gray, they are crumbling away, and their mass is incredible. Having been built to withstand heavy bombing, they proved tricky to take down again. With one, the Viennese did the obvious thing and turned it into an aquarium. Two more moulder away in the Augarten, a park, where they cast grim shadows over picnics and children's games. They are surrounded by fences that have ads for Sattel Fest ("saddle fest"; a horse show?) zip-tied to them.
Imperial Crypt
Rows of metal sarcophagi, some simple, most ornate, holding most of the remains of most of the Habsburgs. The family had a habit, though, of diplomatically parceling themselves out to different churches: hearts in one, innards in another, and what remained here. Whether this was done with an eye to future tourism revenues or not, it does mean that completionists need to buy three tickets (while the rest face a strange decision). The Imperial Crypt was enough for me. It was blazing in Vienna that day; a crypt sounded pretty good. There is a guestbook at the end, which I should have read, to find out what people write in a crypt's guestbook.
Plague column
In 1679, plague broke out in Vienna. The emperor, heroically fleeing the city, promised over his shoulder to have a monument built when the plague ended, should it end, to express gratitude for all the people it didn't kill, assuming there were going to be some. Dedicated to the Trinity, with angels of increasing rank (the short version of angelology is that disembodied heads > babies > adults) around a narrowing cone of clouds, the top covered in gold, the whole curious package wrapped in bird netting.
To sum up, nothing in particular happened in Vienna, but I saw what other tourists see, and then I described it for no clear reason. Writing blog posts is an addiction, in the sense that I feel bad when I don't do it, and then get a momentary feeling of relief when I do.
