St Stephen Cathedral
My photo identifications on Vienna may be a little strange. In the past I’ve used local guide books to help me remember what it was that I’d visited and photographed. In Vienna, I mistakenly got a guidebook written in Italian (for those of you who have been reading this whole blog, you know Italian is one of the many languages I don’t speak. In these languages I just blurt out a few words and gesture a lot - not particularly useful for interpreting books.) Therefore some of the church identifications etc. have been translated through several languages to get to English. (Strange how I can forget the name of churches and always remember the name of the restaurant. . . )
We arrived in Vienna early in the morning and went for a tour of the city after breakfast.
Schoenbrunn Palace entrance
I had my usual problem of trying to take photos out of bus windows (the circus truck is the only one that turned out) but made up for it once I got to walk around.
We visited St Stephens Cathedral (a great gray gothic church that just explodes with light and color on the inside) and the
Schoenbrunn Palace ( a great sunny pile of stone).
The Palace, huge as it is, manages to be cheerful in a formal sort of way.
That’s appropriate since it was merely the summer palace for the Hapsburgs when they ruled the Austia-Hungarian Empire and it is smaller than the winter palace we’ll see tomorrow.
The gardens are immense and were beautiful on a sunny late summer day.
After all that manicured beauty, we did what we always do .
street fair
. . look for someplace to eat.
In
Vienna, even the fast food is stylish;
we went to Wiener Wald, an Austrian chain restaurant for schnitzel and beer.
Later, walking around central
Vienna, we wandered into a festival complete with clowns (from the circus?
Who knows.
Lots of people wearing red clown noses and regular clothes . . . . I never did figure that out.)
Trish and I also tried some Viennese ice cream and I highly recommend the “Mozart” flavor.
We got back to the ship on the public underground transportation system; we’re great believers in avoiding taxis in favor of walking or using public systems (I love trams). Vienna is a very easy city to navigate once you figure out where the Danube is and then use that as your base point of reference.
