Vienna: waltzes and klimt

March 24th

After breakfast at the hostel, we started our second arts-tastic day in Vienna by taking the metro into town and to the Viennese opera or Staatsoper, which originally open in 869 with Mozart's Don Giovanni. Unfortunately, we got there much too early as the building wasn't open and the English tour wasn't until that afternoon. So we were forced to reluctantly move on. I did see hat they were doing Elektra through.

Next, we were off to Stadtpark, which Kelly had heard contained a lot of composer statues. Stadtpark is the park with the largest number of monuments and sculptures in Vienna. On our way to the park however, we went by Karlskirche. This church was built after the plague epidemic of 713 during which Karl VI vowed that he would dedicate a church to St. Charles Borromeo (a patron Saint of the plague) if the city was delivered. I just really really like the columns. We also ran into Brahms.

Rose and I hangin' with Brahms

Finally we got to Stadtpark and wandered around looking at composers. Of course, we had to join the line of tourists running up and taking pictures with some of the monuments. It was a lovely day and we sat in the sun for a while being glad we weren't in England and trying to undo several months of pasty whiteness caused by the fore mentioned country.

lurking in the shadows by the Johann Strauss Monument

Franz Schubert Statue

We wandered for a while through the park and then to the river and had a lovely traditional Austrian lunch. In our continued wandering we ran into some kind of war monument by the Belvedere. Turns out this was the Heroes' Monument of the Red Army in Vienna which, was built to commemorate 17,000 Soviet soldiers who fell in the WWII Battle for Vienna. But today it is considered an unpopular reminder of the Soviet occupation in the weeks following the battle. We liked the fountain though.

Eventually we decided to go to the Belvedere. It seems like every city that we visited on the trip had some kind of Belvedere but this was the only one we went to. And man was it nice. This is the kind of palace I wanna live in. The Belvedere was built in the late 1600's as the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy, a military commander who helped vanquish the Turks. It consists of two Baroque palaces and a huge formal garden between them, which is meant to convey a series of classical allusions. Not only is it lovely, the upper Belvedere also houses some of the collections of the Austrian Gallery. This includes The Kiss and a ton of other Klimt. A great collection in a beautiful place. So, we went from Opera to Klimt in our last day in Vienna.

Klimt's The Kiss