Well, this is going to be a long post. It was a long weekend! On Friday morning we piled into a huge red bus and travelled the 4 1/2 hours to Vienna. That's where it all began....
Friday we had a basic tour of the old city (which is not like the old city of Prague. It's just the center + some rando old things popping up in the middle) by this odd hippy with blue glasses, greasy hair and a historic sense of humor that I don't think anyone else in the group appreciated. We ate dinner as a group (and on the group budget!) at an old monastery in the Vienna Woods. I got a steak--glorious.
Saturday started early with a tour of the Belvedere Art Museum nee Prince Eugen palace. We saw Klimt's "The Kiss". Look it up on google images--it's gorgeous. There are hundreds of other beautiful paintings there, but that was the one that is heavily advertised, and is well worth it. I was supposed to head to an exhibit on controversial photographs, but I got horribly lost....So instead I wandered around Vienna for 2 hours. It wasn't all bad, I finally figured out the metro system and got home. I also spent some of that time inspecting what an Austrian ladies pharmacy looks like. I don't know why, I think I got it from my Mom, but I really like to wander through the "real life" of the people I am visiting. I especially love grocery stores. It is really so interesting to see what people need everyday, how it's packaged, how it's different and how it's so similar to my own needs in life.
That night we all went out together (a rarity in a group of 24) to the area of Vienna called the "Bermuda Triangle" and it's where all the hoppin bars are. So we bar hopped through it. We had such a good time drinking whatever we could afford on the menu, dancing in a mass, avoiding the creepy locals and other tourists and trying to corral all of us for every bar change. Though exhausted the next morning, it was totally worth it to hang out with the whole group.
Sunday, we started the morning at Maria Theresa's palace. It's huge! It reminded me so much of the palaces I saw all over the Russian countryside outside of Petersburg. We didn't get to go in because there had "just been a Russian invasion of tourists and the palace is packed. Ironic." (Ironic because the Russians had a bad habit of invading palaces and destroying them so no one else could enjoy them once they left....) So we wandered around through the gorgeous palace gardens. They had a zoo, a master garden, several green houses and a maze. We choose to get lost repeatedly in the master gardens and pop back out around the green houses. We went in and it was like a scene from Jurassic Park! There were all sorts of crazy green tropical plants and flowers. We saw all sorts of strange, exotic plants and even some giant slugs. So obviously we took the opportunity to take several dinosaur photos all over this poor green house. I pity the fool tourist who met us in the middle of this tirade. Needless to say, we had a ball.
We finished the afternoon with a visit to an art exhibit of an Auschwitz survivor run by his son. All the paintings were about his experiences in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. He was really quite talented. His paintings were abstract but haunting. His website is: http://www.artforum.judenplatz.at/index.html
After giving us the run down of his fathers life and paintings, he took us out for ice cream. An odd thing for a curator to do, but he was an eccentric gentleman, and absolutely adorable. He must be in his 70s or so (He escaped Auschwitz when his Mother told the guard that she wasn't Jewish, and she was just at the train stop to pick up her husband who wasn't either. When the guard insisted that they take her husband, she told them that she would be back for him and quickly walked off the platform with her children. They hid for the remainder of the war. Only by his mother's quick thinking and the grace of God, or the stupidity of the guard, was he saved.)
On the whole, I think I like Prague better than Vienna. I didn't dislike Vienna, I just didn't get the feeling of it's soul the way I can feel Prague's. Maybe I needed more time there. I don't know. It was very similar to so many cities--a city of people moving and churning, with some of their history just laying out to be remembered on the street. I never got the sense that they were still living their history the way the Praguers are. Maybe it's because they were on the "good" side of the Iron Curtain and developed where Prague could not. Maybe they didn't suffer the way Prague did (but don't tell them that!) I can't place it, but I have to say, my heart will always be in the Red side of the Iron Curtain. This trip has confirmed what I suspected when I was in Russia--I belong over here. Sorry Mom.
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Emily
**Pics from Austria: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2042175&id=1562730054&l=8e053822c8
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