Trip: Day 2 Vienna, Austria

I'm posting my trip recaps in small bites so as to not bore you with long posts full of beautiful Vienna photos :). 


On the second day, we woke up early to a fantastic full breakfast provided by our hotel.  We stayed at Hotel Royal in the middle of downtown Vienna.  We very seldom needed to go anywhere that we couldn't walk or take the u-bahn.  Because of our familiarity with public transit in Chicago, it is not difficult to quickly become familiar with the system of a new city.  Vienna's public transportation was consistently clean, quiet and comfortable.  I never once felt threatened, disgusted or even inconvenienced.  It was a very different experience than I have on a day-to-day basis in Chicago.  I am routinely disgusted, often inconvenienced and more often than not, intimidated by ominous-looking loiterers around my el stops.  I digress. 

After a great breakfast and bundling up, we headed to Schloss Schonbrunn (Schonbrunn Palace) and gardens for the morning.  This was the summer home for the Habsburgs, the ruling family of Vienna.  Schönbrunn Palace is a former imperial 1,441-room Rococo summer residence in Vienna, Austria. One of the most important cultural monuments in the country, since the 1960s it has been one of the major tourist attractions in Vienna. The palace and gardens illustrate the tastes, interests, and aspirations of successive Habsburg monarchs.

 After the weirdo museums, wandering around Spittelburg.  It used to be quite seedy but apparently, it has become adorable. :) 

 I don't even pretend to understand art like this.  

 Yum. Free breakfast. 

 Schonbrunn back gardens. 

 Palace in the background. 

 I love art, but this museum was aptly nicknamed the Wiener museum after we spent several delirious hours exploring rooms full of art, mostly by Egon Schiele and Herman Nitsch.  Just google them or watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhrPgx7G3qU. 

Claudia Bosse's art installation, featured about a minute or so into the video, (the name escapes me) was a padded room with voices and weird glass boxes.  I felt crazy.  If that was the intended emotion, she did her job. 

 It was at this point in the Wiener museum (I use that term ironically), when I was falling asleep standing up/horrified by so many Wiener self-portraits, that we decided to breeze through the other two levels and grab a snack and some coffee.  

On Schonbrunn: We took what was probably the best audio-guided tour of any museum or any monument I've ever experienced.  It was very detailed and even allowed us to walk through the room in which Franz Joseph kept his private quarters, the family's dining room and even the room in which a little Mozart made his debut to the ruling family.  After that, we headed to the gardens and monuments behind the palace.  We were afforded some of the best views in Austria.  It was overcast and chilly, but we arrived early enough that there were few crowds.  After we finished wandering around, we explored yet another Christkindl Markt before heading back to our side of Vienna for a couple of museums: The Leopold and The MUMOK.