So I lied about not working on this until I get home, since now that my friends are irrevocably gone (and my host dad leaves tomorrow morning for the campagne!), I have only my blog to keep me company.
Alors, Viena: my third stop on this spring break extravaganza that is getting infinitely dragged out in the retelling. Anyway, as some of you may know, I have been obsessed for a while with the idea of night trains. Finally my moment came: night train, toute seule, from Krakow to Vienna. This train was old and Soviet (labels in Russian, hm). I gave my ticket the the conductor when I got on so that he could wake me up when we reached my stop. There was a prepackaged Nutella-filled croissant and a toiletry pack awaiting me on my bunk in my couchette car - the top of three bunks, very close quarters. Of the two ladies I shared the 'cabin' with, one insisted on speaking to me in German (so really I can't say much about her) and was apparently very absent-minded; the other was a Polish porcelain design student who studies half in Ljubljana, quite a trip from Krakow I learned. Sort of the people you expect to meet on a bizarre nocturnal escapade between Krakow and Vienna. As it was really hard to get down from my bunk, I spent the night sleeping/lying there thinking how cool it was that I was on a night train/making one visit into the corridor to relish the dark Slovakian industrial wasteland.
Around 6am, I arrived in Vienna and checked into the Meininger City Hostel, where a very serious breakfast of meat and muesli awaited me - the Austrians don't play games. It was refreshing to have a little time to strike out on my own. Although I would've gotten lonely if I'd done it for 11 days, it gave me time to stroll and reflect on the jumble of things I'd crammed into my last week. I immediately liked Vienna - palaces everywhere, great food, clean, cobbled streets in the old city, lots of famous composers. My first (and maybe favorite?) stop was the Belvedere Museum (a palace), which is especially known for its collection of Klimt and his contemporaries. Like everyone, I spent a lot of time in front of The Kiss and Judith. They also some of his painting os fields of flowers, which are beautiful in a different way. The Art Nouveau look evident in Klimt's work is really evident in the city itself and is really quite different from Paris in that way. I see lots of art in Paris, in other words, but I felt like I was seeing a veritably different scene in Vienna. I wandered from there into the old city center around Stephansplatz. There, the cathedral, Stephansdom, is surround by impeccably clean cobbled streets peppered with pleasant cafes. In one of the side streets radiating from the square is the Mozarthaus, where Mozart was living when he wrote the Marriage of Figaro. The man moved around quite a lot, but this was a peak. The house doesn't have any of his stuff left inside really, although there were some very interesting papers -- notably the composition workbooks of some of his pupils, with Mozart's own corrections (including those belonging to a British student, to whom Mozart scribbled marginalia in English!) In the afternoon I met up with a Ms. Henke, the friend of a family friend, who lives right by this platz and was kind enough to show me around. She took me to one of several Easter markets (stalls with food and colored eggs) in the city, and then to tea in one of Vienna's many, many palaces. As we strolled around, she pointed out the most famous choreographer of the Vienna Opera, and then the stables where the famously chic horses of the Spanish Riding School are kept. The day per se was rather short, though, because at 4:30 I bid farewell and started by marathon wait for a standing room opera ticket. I knew from the get-go that the opera was really a necessity in Vienna, and was willing to do what it took. While even the cheapest seats cost upwards of $100, standing room is 3 euros. As I waited for 2.5 hours for my ticket, I observed that the crowd was generally much more serious than others I've experienced: half the people in line were already reading the libretto. This was confirmed when we received our tickets and a veritable stampede of ostensibly dignified adults erupted heading up to the balconies to get the best standing room spots. Hours of standing were totally worth it, though -- Anna Bolena was stunning. It had been wildly acclaimed in Vienna, a place where everyone seemed to talk about opera, and for good reason. The women's voices had everyone practically in tears.
The next morning, I went to the Museum of the Austrian Resistance in the old town hall. Interesting since we tend to concentrate on Germany, but also for its attention to post-war neo-Nazi activity in Austria. Then I went inside Stephansdom (quite nice but I was a bit overchurched) before meeting up with my friends Anila, Allegra, Rachel, and Allison, who had just arrived in town. We made an afternoon of the Schonbrunn Schloss (palace) and gardens: home of the Hapsburgs. The sprawling palace is a splendid butter yellow color, and while more or less inside the city, has a pretty rural feel. We immediately felt compelled to sing 'The Sound of Music.' Many of the interior rooms are actually left as they were for the last emperor, Franz Josef, who lived until 1916. So they feel much more recently lived in, with photos of his family, a flush toilet, etc. On the other hand, the influence of the 18th-century Empress Maria Theresa, the last Hapsburg and mother of Marie Antoinette, was also very strong. We all especially liked the room where a young Mozart came and played for her, a room alight with dancing 'candlelight' and mirrors. After eating a life-changing piece of kaiserschmarrn, which is a kind of chopped up pancake mashed up with sugar and plums. So, so good. And we climbed up into the gardens where there was a sort of pavilion that we couldn't enter and a beautiful panoramic view. I split with my friends for a bit to explore the Kunsthistorisches Museum (the 'main' art museum), which I remembered fondly in name from an art board game I had long ago. The interior of this (surprise!) palace is overwhelming - marble and gold everywhere. I could do without all the Rubens, but I really loved the Bruegel room: they had the Peasant Wedding, Children's Games, Hunters in the Snow, and my favorite, The Tower of Babel. I then hopped across the street to a new complex of palaces-turned-museums called MuseumsQuartier. I only went to the Leopold, which has the biggest collection of Egon Schiele anywhere, a few good Klimts, and a really interesting narrative about the interaction of art, poetry, and psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century. The day ended with an apricot cake (Venetian pastries = big win) with my friends at the pastry heaven called Aida, just off Stephansplatz. Then, too soon, I was off again, this time to Germany.
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