european vacation part 2: vienna (or mostly mozart)

After a lovely ride in our OWN compartment on the night train to Vienna, we arrived at Wien West at 6:30 am. Took the Underground to our hostel which was about as far away as possible (last stop on U4). Next we were confronted with the hills of Austria. After putting our bags in an unlocked luggage room, we were unsure of what to do next (by this point it was like 7 am). So we trained it back to the center of the city and looked for the Opera house, and ended up walking the wrong way. We eventually found it along with a place to get coffee. AMERICAN STYLE (and it wasn't at Starbucks, although this is ALWAYS an option in Europe). No more of this espresso crap.



Vienna was mostly pretty boring. And I say mostly mozart due to the vast amount of gift shops with this title, as well as the numerous men dressed in period costume trying to invite you to a symphony or something. As someone who doesn't appreciate classical music, I didn't really have much appreciation for Vienna.

The coolest things we saw were all in museums. They have this area called Museumsquartier where they have a bunch of art museums. We hit up the Museum Moderner Kunst (Modern Art Museum) one day...they had a sweet exhibition on this Austrian artist named Maria Lassnig. Shes currently like 90 years old and still painting massive pieces.



Also in the Museumsquartier is the Kunsthalle...which is an exhibition hall for really contemporary art, or as they describe themselves, "cool and disturbing art". The current show was called Sex and Crime. The Sex part was titled "The Porn Identity" and had stuff by Marcel DuChamp...then had pornos, movies about porn, one of the statues from the bar in "A Clockwork Orange":



The Crime portion was pretty cool and hard to define. It was really dark and had a room where you could listen to Miles Davis, a room where you could listen to readings of "The Halloween Tree" by Ray Bradbury stuff by Poe...etc. Then there was an installation by some sort of pretentious artist named Banks Violette who's works were about the glamorization of violence in America. My favorite part of the show was a section on Weegee, a street photographer in the 20s-40s who was known for his photos of murders/criminals/dead bodies...



Also saw the Hapsburg's imperial palace at Schönbrunn. Kind of put Versailles to shame.




Also went to the Belvedere another palace that has been converted into a massive art museum. This place houses Gustave Klimt's "The Kiss":




They had a special show on Alfonse Mucha...one of my favorites. He's a Czech artist who did a lot of posters...but also did everything from paintings to engravings to jewelry design and also designed the Slavic Pavillion for the Paris World's Fair in 1900.




We took the tram to Grinzing, a really cute little town where we were supposed to be able to see all of Vienna...turns out you had to hike like 3 miles uphill to achieve this. We did it, then we ate Käsestreusel and Apfelstreusel with a cup of Viennese coffee (called a melange, I guess).



I guess looking back Vienna wasn't as lame as it felt at the time...but I don't think its one of my favorites.