Vienna is our first stop on our long fall Europe trip. We had a week here, so we were able to take our time seeing the sites and getting over jetlag. Usually, jetlag doesn’t bother me, but this time I had a hard time sleeping when I am supposed to be sleeping, and staying awake when I was supposed to be awake… So we sometimes just visited one or 2 attractions a day and did a lot of relaxing in between. We saw a lot of museums and Vienna had some great art. Gustav Klimt is the famous Vienna guy and it was good to see his best stuff but we also saw impressionists, Picasso, old masters, and a lot of other stuff that were really cool.
We also visited 2 of the palaces but not the biggest one (Schonbrunn) that was out of town a bit. We have been to a lot of palaces in many countries and I just don’t enjoy them so we didn’t make an effort to get to Schonbrunn. The Hapsburgs of Austria controlled a lot of Europe for a long time so there are many beautiful huge old buildings with all fancy stuff that come with that. Some people like to look at how impressive they are, but for me it just pisses me off that these people were so rich, when the rest of the country were very poor. But some of the places had good history exhibits or art so we did go through a couple.
The cathedral in Vienna was also very impressive but we didn’t spend much time there or climb the tower. Jetlag may have contributed to our lack of interest…
We also saw the Vienna Natural History Museum which had a huge collection of specimens of everything. It was impressive and similar to a lot of the other natural history museums we have seen, but I still prefer our Burke natural history museum in Seattle where you can actually see people “doing science”.
We ate a lot of good food in Vienna including most of the specialties like schnitzel, Sachar tortes (chocolate cake) and sausages. Our favorite meal might have been the brotchen which are little open face sandwiches. Kind of like what they we got in Copenhagen Denmark a few years ago but much smaller and more of a variety in toppings. We also drank of lot of wine :>)
Overall, the town just felt very fancy and was a little pricey compared to what we are going to see in the rest of our trip. We were able to get around town very easy on the subway and trams and did a lot of walking. We are still trying to slow down our traveling and stop trying to see a whole city in 2 or 3 days and this was a good start… Next stop is Budapest Hungary.
