Fun Fact of the Day: Austria is where the very first postcards were used! Today was such a great day! We were in Vienna for the whole day so we were able to experience not only the history but also have time to go out and explore on our own. Only downside? It was 32 degrees Celsius - or 90 degrees F. If you are thinking, well that’s not too bad, quit your whining (probably still true!) it is also 80 - 90% humidity. So if you live in the South you can understand, otherwise think of super hot sauna that you are walking and hiking around in! Needless to say my 6.5 miles of walking yesterday produced just a little bit of sweat ;) So now for a little history... Austria is a country of nearly 8.4 million people, with 1.9 million of them living in one of Vienna’s 23 districts. The most “important” district is District 1, which is the city center. People here speak German, but our guide T told us that even he struggles to speak with people in Germany and other parts of Austria sometimes (he is Viennese) just due to dialectic differences. One of the most famous people from Vienna, or Wien as it is written in German, was Johann Strauss who was known first and foremost for his musical prowess and secondly for being a renowned womanizer. He was engaged 13 times and married 3. They are also known for Mozart as well. The Opera House is a gorgeous building that apparently is always losing money since they put on different operas every night (costumes, set, people changed) but the people feel it’s important in the city to introduce their young people and others to music. Once a year they have a ball there, which is for just the best of the best at a whopping 20,000 Euros a ticket ($23,418). Vienna is also known for Lipizzan horses – these horses begin as brown foals but by the time they are 10 years old they are fully pure white. Some of us decided not to take the bus back, so we stayed in the city the entire afternoon. We were able to hit up some amazingly famous sites, such as Cafe Demel (a 1786 cafe famous for its iced coffee and pastries), waited in line to get a slice of the Viennese Sacher-Torte from the famous Cafe Sacher (known for its most well known visitor - our friend Sigmond Freud), saw corpses of saints in St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church, and hit up the “Toilet Guy” house. Now, “toilet guy”... Toilet guy’s name is actually Friedrich Stowasser, but he was better known as Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser - but due to my laziness I’ll just refer to him as Hundertwasser. I first learned of him on accident; one of my Hungarian friends I met while living in New Zealand and I went on a long trip around the country and he told me we had to take this long detour to see some toilets. To which my response was, “........WHAT? Toilets?!’ Because really, going out of your way for a day to see toilets seems...odd? Crazy? Creepy? He kindly explained to me that this famous Viennese artist, Hundertwasser, lived in New Zealand and had designed some infamous toilets and urinals there. So, not thrilled, we took off to Kawakawa, New Zealand to see some toilets. In the end they were actually kind of cool - no doubt they are considered the most photographed toilets in NZ (which you would kind of hope ... do people photograph their toilets normally??). Now this brings me 8 years later to today. Hundertwasser was born in Vienna and designed a house, “village”, and a building that now houses his other artwork. My family was gracious enough to go way out of town, utilizing the really nice public subway, to find this little gem. It was really cool to be able to walk on the strange bumpy landscape (he added to facades and the ground, never taking away anything that already existed), check out the wavy detailed facades, and see the bright, fun colors. I even got a squished “penny” (European 2 cent piece)! We ate some delicious local foods at a terrace cafe in the village before hitting up the outside of the museum and heading to St. Stephen’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. The inside of St. Stephen’s is beautiful and insanely ornate, but as wonderful as it was to see the intricate insides, that was not our purpose. Our purpose was something much more sinister. In St Stephen’s there is a massive South Tower that took 65 years to complete! It was used as the main observatory and command post over the city, as well as an ancient fire notification system. This was done until 1956, when they retired it and opened it up to the public. Today, for 5 Euros you can climb up 343 stairs to a viewing deck, HIGH above the city. Now at first I was thinking (dumbly), “Oh 343 steps? That can’t be too bad! I can do that” which was the WRONG thing to think. My thinking should have changed once I saw the first set of incredibly sweaty, red faced tourists coming DOWN the stairs into the entryway but again I was feeling confident. That was a TERRIBLE decision! Kind of. The first 100 or so of the narrow (I wear size 6.5 shoes and they fit but anything bigger would not have fit on the steps) steep stone spiral were okay. By 101 I was having some issues breathing and needing to stop. By 200 I was concerned someone might find my corpse along the way. By 300 I was sweaty, exhausted, and a red-faced tourist. By 343 I nearly collapsed and kissed the landing’s ground like a pirate who had been at sea for 20398 years. It was an astoundingly gorgeous view of the city - you could see all around you and it was definitely worth the view in the end, and luckily there were places to sit and attempt to catch your breath. The joke about climbing church towers (no, this was not my first one, and no I didn’t learn from the other difficult climbs apparently) is when you are going up people always seem to say, “You’re about halfway up!” And you believe them. Until 15 minutes later someone else comes and says, “You’re about halfway up!” And you begin to doubt that people understand how to measure what halfway is. N and I joked as we attempted to not roll all the way down 343 steps to our deaths that this was going to be a Twilight Zone episode: All of the visitors went up, but none of them came back down. This isn’t possible in the real world, but it is here in the Twilight Zone... (cue Twilight Zone music). But really. We thought we might not make it back down either. Sadly, my knee went out approximately 2 steps into the descent so by the bottom it was fully swollen and bruised. I hobbled my sad little self back to the subway and we got back to the boat. We enjoyed a nice meal (I’ll add food names once I get access to my photographs again) and I went straight to bed exhausted. Tomorrow to see some more cute tiny Viennese towns!
1 Comment
Ashley
7/8/2018 06:43:30 pm
I hope your knee is feeling better!
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