Vienna
We barely had time to unpack from Belfast when we had to leave for Vienna. Poor us!
John had a work conference to attend, so for him it was not pure leisure, but I was just along for the ride and took full advantage. After several years of him sending me lovely photos of the city in between EGU sessions, we decided to extend his stay and have a little vacation to celebrate our ten-year anniversary.
Our hotel was in Leopoldstadt, right over the canal from the city center, very convenient to several metro stations and a nice walk from far too many interesting things. While John went off to the conference during the daytime, I would head into town to explore until my feet hurt and/or it got too hot, then pop back to the hotel until the cool of the evening, at which point John would get a little down time before we headed out for beer and schnitzel with his colleagues.
Vienna is an amazing city, very walkable, with an excellent metro system that makes it easy to explore. I purchased a week pass, (unlimited travel in the centre for €22.60) which covered underground, streetcars, and buses, and everywhere I wanted to visit.
There was too much to see in a week, so we decided to hit the biggies together. St. Stephen’s Cathedral, which dominates the center of town – where we climbed the tower and descended to the catacombs. The Belvedere, with its Klimts of course, but also a bit of everything, including an modern artist exhibition interspersed among the classical religious collection. And finally Schönbrunn palace and its gardens, beautiful but truly imperial in scale – forty rooms open to visitors out of 1441 plus vast gardens that we could easily have spent another two hours exploring. The flowerbeds were barren, looks like we missed the planting by just a few weeks, but that’s the nature of gardens and there was plenty to see including a surprisingly fun hedge maze! As a special treat we got dressed up went to the State Opera, which is a beautiful building with delicious little cakes. After the show we had beer and spaetzle.
Aside from that we squeezed a self-guided Otto Wagner walking tour, saw the Secession Building, walked around the historic center of the city with its state buildings, palaces and parks, and popped up to the Augarten to see the ominous German WWII flak towers. I did a lot of sightseeing on my own too; after spending the first day mistaking the Danube Canal for the Danube istelf, I walked up to take a proper look and was delighted by both the views from the bridge and the fact it has a metro station right in the middle. I walked around the Prater and saw the ferris wheel which appears in The Third Man, visited several markets, and just generally wandered about looking at things.