Back from the Wild Blue part 2 - Vienna and Bratislava

As I said last time, the train to Vienna was brutally hot and humid. Fortunately, it was a short ride. I'm pretty sure everyone breathed a literal sigh of relief when we stepped off at Westbahnhof in Vienna. Instead of being in a hostel, we got to live in an actual hotel this time, rather than a hostel. We only had two people to a room, with our own showers. Sweet deal, I know.

There was a little bit of walking around the first day, but there wasn't too much going on. Almost everyboy slept in that night, since Munich had been so busy. The next morning we had a tour through the historical center of Vienna, as well as the grounds of the Hofburg, the Habsburg Palace. St Stephansdom is pretty amazing, and I really think that Vienna has a certain classic flair to it that I hadn't seen before. There are old buildings right alongside new construction, and statues and monuments are absolutely everywhere. At the entrance to the Hofburg alone, there is a scuplture of Lucifer being cast from Heaven, four sculptures of Hercules, and some excavated Roman ruins. I think one of my favorite pieces of scuplture in Vienna was the Peste Column, created to commemorate the end of the Black Plague. The Plague itself, represented by a Gorgon-like figure, is being impaled by a flaming spear, while angels soar above it. Pretty damn intense, no?

The Hofburg grounds themselves are massive, with squares within plazas within gardens. Speaking of gardens, there are over 300 varieties of roses in the gardens at Heldenplatz (Hero Plaza). We also passed by the Bundesrat (Parliament) building, which has a large statue of Athena (the Greek goddess of wisdom) outside of it. You'd think that they'd want the wisdom inside the building, but to each his own. A few of us even went back to the Gardens later for a picnic, since the weather was so nice.

That night, we saw a concert of Mozart and Strauss. It was good music, but the whole production was tailored towards the audience, which was mostly made up of 3 or 4 tour buses of tourists from China, France, and America. There were dancers and singers in addition to the music, but they really just made the whole production seem gimmicky.

The next day, we went on a tour of the Silberkammer (Silver Collection), Kaiser Apartments (Imperial Apartments), and Sisi Museen (Elisabeth, the wife of Franz Josef), before heading to an operetta, Grafin Meriza. All three museums were pretty interesting, although the decoration of the silver owned by the Habsburgs kind of makes it unusable at the table. The Apartments were interesting, as were the Sisi museum. I always like to see how the upper crust lived. Franz Josef, to his credit, was beloved by the Austrian people as a patriot and a great leader (he worked something like...18 hours a day), so I can grant him some luxury. We also got to go on a short tour of the Parliament building before the operetta. The building itself was really cool, with lots of sculpture and columns. There was also an eagle sculpture on the wall clasping a hammer and sickle, which, we were assured only symbolized agriculture and industry, not communism.

The operetta was great. It was a classic story. Count has no money for his sister's dowry. Countess has lots of money, an attendant in love with her, and the Count's sister in tow. Countess makes up fake suitor to create some excitement. Count gets friend to masquerade as the fake suitor, while the count becomes the Countesses business manager. Needless to say, by the end of the operetta, the Count and Countess fall in love, as do the Friend and the Sister, and the Attendant and some Random 3rd Love Interest. This was all set to excellent gypsy/roma music (with a bizarre Las Vegas-esque sequence in the middle). It was performed in German, but we had the benefit of an English synopsis, and a projection of the current action in English on a screen above the stage. After the opera, a large group of us went to this club near our hotel for the rest of the night.

On Thursday, we had a free day (although it rained, unfortunately). I managed to make it up the north tower of Stephansdom after checking out the inside of the cathedral, although it got hard to continue towards the top. It was worth the assault on my nerves, though, because the view from the top was amazing. Afterwards, I went to the Mozarthaus and got a little history on the man. The weather really prevented me from doing too much that day, unfortunately; I wanted to go to Schonbrunn, another Habsburg Palace, but it wouldn't be the same without a sunny day.

Friday was our day trip to Bratislava. It's such a ridiculously beautiful city, with excellent views. We walked all the way up to the castle/museum and looked across the Donau (Danube) at the soviet block housing to the east. We also saw the storm front moving in, and decided that we should get inside. It wasn't too much later when we found out that this was a really good idea. We were in a hall with French tapestries when the wind picked up, and the rain began to fly horizontally. Hail rattled against the windows. A few of us moved away from the windows, and went to make sure that the others did the same. Suddenly, we heard a bang, and the wind was inside the hall. I ran to where the rest of our group was, and found two or three tapestries on the ground, and the carpeting blown back halfway across the room. A fire extinguisher had been knocked off the wall. 6 or seven other people were holding the window shut against the wind. I snapped a couple of pictures before I got in to help them. In hindsight, saving a few tapestries might not have been worth the risk of being showered in broken glass (and the danger was there), but it seemed like a good idea at the time. We quickly realized that one of us spoke any Russian (and none of us spoke Slovakian), so we found out that the window was actually broken. After the wind died down a bit, we did manage to wedge the window shut again with some exposed nails. Nobody was seriously hurt, although one Slovakian guy got a cut lip from a wildly flailing window blind. Afterwards, one of the museum workers (who spoke little English) wrung her hands (literally; this is the first time I've actually seen someone do that) and shook her head furiously trying to thank us. She wouldn't accept my offer to help her move the carpeting back (through the power of pantomime), and we went off through the museum.

Honestly, after all of that, it seemed a bit lame.

Saturday, we got on a train, and headed north through the Czech Republic on a 9 hour trip to Berlin. There is some really beautiful landscapes that can be seen on that route. There were also some really stupid things that happened. Such as one of our group forgetting her Passport in Berlin, and having to get off the train with her luggage before crossing the Czech border. She wasn't in class today, obviously, since she had to get another train on her own, as well as possible lodging and other such things. She's lucky that she's in the advanced German class, or else it might have been even worse for her. We lost another student also, but not because he got booted off the train. Instead, he mysteriously got off in Prague (probably thinking we had more time than we actually did), and got left behind with nothing but his wallet (which had a copy of his passport), as I understand it. He made it back in time for classes today, since it's only a 4-5 hour trip from Prague.

Again, I'll end this post with a word of caution. 9 Hour train rides make people go crazy. They start to yell. They start to argue. They start to tell long, rambling, bullshit jokes about horses. Double plus ungood if they've been drinking for 6 of the 9 hours. Please note, these don't apply to every member of the program group, but the ones that stick out in my mind. I had to leave the car a few times in order to get some semblance of peace and fresh air. Hell, I even sat down in the dining car rather than getting something to go.

That's all for now. I'm way past my bedtime.