But after our initial adjustment we had a great time. Vienna is home to some of the greatest musicians and artists of all time and it has been an imperial capital for many years so it is a grand city.
Palaces everywhere, museums in palaces, Mozarts on the street trying to sell you tickets to the opera, and coffehouses at every turn.
| Johanne Strauss Sr and Jr. | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart | Ludwig Boltzmann |
| Freidrich Shubert | Ludwig von Beethoven | Ludwig Wittgenstein |
| Johannes Brahms | Adolf Hitler | Karl Poppper |
| Walking Around | ||
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This is a fascinating clock. It moves slowely throughout the day, the figure walk past over 12 hours, each one holds a number in their hands for the hour. Where they stand tells you what minute it is. At noon everyday all 12 figures parade through while music plays from inside. Quite a crowd was there to watch it. |
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This is a main square in Vienna, to my left not seen in the picture is the huge St. Stephens Cathedral. This round road with a mishmash of new and old buildings is the location of the old roman wall, which explains its round curve. | |
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A truly imposing place on the outside. This catholic cathedral has been built up in many differnt times. The front face over the door is early Romanesque. Further up the catedral becomes Gothic and the constuction stopped in the middle of the of the other spires when the Gothic style fell out of favour. | |
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Mozart wrote the opera Figaro in this little house. There are many places in Vienna where there is a Mozart story each has some kind of plaque. However Beethoven, who also spent most of his life here, moved around to so many different homes in town that they can't really do that, he lived everywhere. Apparently they say this was due partly to his deafness in later life, which made him play the piano so loud that he would quickly be kicked out. | |
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Johannes Guttenberg: inventor of the printing press Why is he here in a small square hidden deed in the city? Because he's important. Guttenberg never set foot in Vienna, go figure. |
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This is a wonderful example of the style of home that our tour guide insisted on showing us over and over. In most houses in Vienna there was only one staircase built, and there were no internal hallways. To get to your apartemtn you would walk along the hanging walkways to your door on the outside. These walkways would be enclosed inside a courtyard and sometimes would have roofs over them. This means that Vienna is full of hidden spaces and walkways because every building is hollow, more than once our tour guide led us through what we through was a door into a building only to end up on another street. | |
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| Museums, musuems, museums... | ||
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all in stone. 10 years to complete | |
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Jobst bürgi on the left - first clock ever with a second hand on the right- first clock to ever show the Copernican uninverse (top) where the sun is in the centre, on the bottom of the clock there is an earth centred version as well. This was only 20 years or so after Copernicus' discoveries |
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These are the stairs inside the museum leading up the cafe. We had quite an ordeal finding this museum though. Four or five buildings are part of the same museum, the KHM (Kunst Historisches Museum - Museum of Art History). So we went into one very large buliding, the Neue Berg shown below actually, which looked big and said KHM on it. Little did we know it housed only weapons and musical instruments. But we couldn't get the man at the desk to really explain or admit that this was not the KHM we and all other tourists wanted to go to. It wasn't the art gallery, which was across the street. While sitting in the cafe at the top of these stairs after we'd finally found it lily said - "i think i could use some alchohol" and she promptly ordered a liquored coffee. | |
| The Cemetary | ||
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This is where lily placed our flowers This is the Musiker section of the central cemetary in Vienna. It holds the remains of Beethoven, Strauss (both shown here), Schubert, Brahms and a few others i do not know. Mozart himself was not burried here but in an unmarked grave in another cemetary presumably since he was poor when he died. At the time I wondered how they managed to bury them all in the same place, did they know they were that great at the time? It turns out that in the 19th Century the old gravyards ran out of space for dead Viennese so a new larger graveyard was built outside of town. But no one wanted to be buried so far from their home so in order to encourage them they decided to move all the famous Viennese such as the musical composers over to the new graveyard, and then everyone would want to be close to the great ones. |
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The grave of Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) on top there is the inscription S = k. log W which relate to his scientific theories that made him famous. Unfortunately the greatness of his work was only acknowledged when proof of his theories was found a few months after he killed himself for being a failure. |
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| Outside Museums | ||
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in here lily & i almost lost it. this is labelled in german only as the KDM but it is only where a few obscure collections are. we didn't realize this until after we paid. and the attendent was unforgivinq of our lack of understanding of german signs & their comdlex museum system. | |
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in the distance is the lower belvedere. the picture was taken in front gf the udder dalace | |