A day of culture, music and art

Wednesday 18th - Vienna day 1

I love Vienna! :D

The sleeping train dropped us off at the right stop thank goodness! and we both managed to get at least 3 hours sleep. So we walked to our hostel - right around the corner from the main Bahnhof and U-Bahn! to try to see if they would let us check in at 6.30 in the morning. Sadly no, so we put our luggage in one of their lockers and had some breakfast at the hostel while we tried to decide what we were going to do for the day.

Important note: Hostel Ruthensteiner is AWESOME and if you're ever in Vienna I recommend that you stay there - but book in advance as they were fully booked the whole time we were there!

Ingo got a bit stroppy with me that morning - I think maybe I'd pulled the "you be my tour guide" chain a bit too much - and told me that I HAD to read the info and I had to choose some things that I want to do ;) So I got all organised and picked a nice long list of things that I thought sounded pretty awesome and then the two of us tried to work out the best way.

One of the tour guides we had on loan from Ingo's parent's had this walk around the city that you could do so we decided that, since it incorporated a few of the things we wanted to see, and also led us to a couple of the places we wanted to go to, it would be a great place to start!

So we caught the U-bahn into the centre of the city and started off at the Stephansdom, another old baroque gothic church that was stunning! There were horses and carts driving people all around the city and tourists everywhere! From there we wandered down a few tiny streets with hardly any people and found some nice spots and as Ingo tried to follow the map of the walk we came across the next church the Jesuitenkirche which was pretty boring looking actually, and we thought, 'is that it?!' and just as Ingo was about to walk away I was said "well we've come this way to see it so we may as well go inside!" and it was just as well we did because we came across the most incredibly OTT church you have ever seen ever! Anything you could put into a church was in there - it had marble in every colour available, straight marble columns and spiralling marble columns, gold leaf on everything!!! Balconies wherever they could possibly fit and statues and frills and trills on every single surface. Even the chairs were over the top! The organ looked like something out of a bad sci-fi horror film that would command people and send them to their doom - it was awesome!!! haha and we almost walked straight past! talk about a juxtaposition!

We found an couple of cool looking statues and water fountains and were struggling hard to keep our feet working and our eyes open, so we found a small patch of grass and fell asleep on the grass for half an hour :)

When we woke up we carried right on with the walking tour which took us to a main plaza that was surrounded by massive large buildings with domes and horses and carts everywhere! We walked through one of the arches and into another plaza where we found a map that led us to the Schmetterlingshaus (house of butterflies). It was basically a giant greenhouse of plants and waterfalls, a staircase in a tree trunk and a small bridge. There were some massive butterflies and when we first went in 2 kids were standing near the entrance with a large blue and black/brown butterfly flying around them and it landed on the boys hand! so cool! but then of course I was obsessed with getting one to land on my hand. Sadly it didn't happen, although the butterflies themselves were pretty cool!

We then walked from there around the gardens that were right my there and sat down amongst the locals for another wee rest ;) It was pretty nice! schön! :D and there were people with guitars, and people with BBQ's (Grill) and people drinking beer! in public! and not having to hide it or getting told to poor it out! just civilised drinking on a sunny afternoon :) very cool ;)

From there we went a wandering towards the Museum's Quartier to go to the modern art gallery MUMOK (MUseum von MOdern Kunst(Art)) We passed a brass (I think) statue of Mr Geothe and as a tip of the hat to my German language courses at the Geothe Institut I had a photo with him :) We then made it to MQ and sat down at one of the cafes for kaffe und kuchen and then made our way to MUMOK. The plaza in the MQ is awesome - there are these bright colour bench like things everywhere and there were people all over them just chilling out in the sun! so cool! The museum's main exhibition was by Brigitte Kowanz. She had covered the walls in mirror's including these 2 wardrobe like spaces, and then within the room there were individual boxes which were made out of what I'm guessing must have been window/mirrors as they had fluro tubes in shapes and words on the boxes that were then reflected throughout the entire box. Some very cool effects! The rest of the gallery work was a bit blah, whole canvas's of solid colours and cardboard boxes in a pile, that kinda thing, which is really neither mine or Ingo's thing so we didn't linger too long :)


Caught the U-Bahn back to the hostel and were finally able to check in so we went straight to bed (it was now something like 4pm) and slept for a couple of hours so that we would be fresh for our evening activities.


Woken, showered and fresh we ventured out for our planned evening activities. First off to the Haus der Musik, a relatively new (2 years old) museum dedicated to the great composers and the sciences of sound ;) I again highly highly recommend this museum! It was fantastic!!! In the very first room they had classical music CDs that you could sit and listen to, and to be honest I could've stayed right there for the rest of the night! But I'm glad we didn't as there were games you could 'compose your own music' with and points where you could hear different things happening to your voice as you control them, you could make your own sounds and then put them all together and I had a play with being a conductor with my very own orchestra! Awesome!!! They had seperate rooms with the history's of a select group of composers; Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin to name a few... which were set up to the composers style and period, with their music playing. It was so very cool! But not really photographable naturally as it's dedicated to sound ;)


We were also very lucky with our timing as Vienna has a summer festival at this time where they have a giant screen set up outside in front of this beautiful old building, and then seats all around it. They play a different Opera, Ballet or Symphony every night and there are food stalls and tables further out which sell all amounts of different types of food (and beer) including an Aussie stall (which we avoided ;) ) We ordered the Kase Fleisch Kase and some Wurst (I'm getting used to writing all noun's in capital's the true German way now ;) ) Bier, and then off so sit and watch a modernised version of Aida (which I'd never heard of :s) that was in Italien with German subtitles and not easy German either! So Ingo had to keep translating the hard bits for me :) Then we went back to the hostel so that I could ring mum for her birthday :)


Great first day in Wien!