Day 16: 27/04/06 Vienna

The Austrian Parliament House. The tower in the background is the Rathaus.

The main altar of Stephensdom.

Inside the State Opera House: we were waiting for Swan Lake to start

Our collection of soft toys: try to guess which one(s) belongs to who?

We reached Vienna at around 0730; we were all half-awake due to the poor sleeping condition. Luckily the hostel was very near the train station (we had no more route marches after that as I intentionally booked hostels just next to train stations) and we went straight there hoping we could at least get a room to rest for a while.

Vienna had more than one train station; we arrived in Wien Westbahnhof, the main station for most EC, IC and ICE trains. Our hostel is called 'Hostel Ruthensteiner' and is a rather good hostel to my standards. I will elaborate later.

The hostel was rather packed. There were a lot of Asians too, which I highly suspect a family group eating breakfast to be Singaporean. I booked a triple which cost 15.50 euros per person per night (very cheap! compare to Heidelberg's 20 euros bunk beds which we could not check out at 10am). We bought breakfast and sat at the bar to eat while we wait for our room to be ready; the girl who sold breakfast saw us doing that and was really amused. By the way, the reception girls were all quite cute :)

We could not get our room in time as they needed time to clean it, so we decided to start our programme first and return to get our room in the afternoon.

My programme for the day was 'sightseeing' and 'ballet'. Vienna was famous for its Philharmonic Orchestra, State Opera House and Vienna Boy's Choir (which caused Jeff, Tk and Yj to start making fun of me doubting my sexual inclination even before the start of the trip); and in terms of sights other than the palaces it was famous for Ringstrasse's artitecture. Before leaving for Europe I had done some research and I knew that the programme at State Opera for the night was Tchaikovsky's 'Swan Lake'; I was determined to make it happen. Of course, other than that GCS recommended some sights e.g. Heldenplatz, Belvedere and Kunsthistoriches Museum. I was determined to make that happen too.

We started off from Karlsplatz, taking a tram anticlockwise around Ringstrasse and alighted at Universitat (To GCS: is this the place you studied when you were there? And what was the golden statue with wings opposite it?). There was nothing much to see along this stretch of Ringstrasse so we skipped it conveniently on the tram. We started walking towards Karlsplatz from Universitat. From there onwards we passed by the Rathaus, a neo-Gothic structure which was more than 100m tall; opposite it was the Burgtheatre. Further down we reached the parliament house, which was built in Greek style with Athena, the goddess of wisdom, standing in a fountain in front of the main entrance. I didn't know what it was built using (marble perhaps?); the whole building looked purely white and some gold fleece and it was impressive. We spent quite some time there taking photos and admiring it.

Next we reached Maria Theresien Platz, the place where the Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History Museum) and Kunsthistorisches Museum (Art History Museum) are located. The two buildings directly opposite across the square were exact mirror images of each other; we tried counting the small statues on the roof and even that was exact. In the middle was a huge bronze statue of Maria Theresa, a (or rather the only) Habsburg Empress who left lots of palaces and buildings for us to admire. Kunsthistorisches Museum was highly recommended by GCS and we would be visiting it the next day. The collections were indeed very impressive.

Opposite that is the Heldenplatz, or Hero's Square, another location recommended by GCS. Our guidebooks did not say much about the place; the only thing I knew about that was Hitler used to made a speech on a balcony in the Hofburg facing the square during the Anschluss. We did not know why it was called Hero's Square too. When we were there, we could not understand why GCS liked it so much: the whole place was full of tourists, horse carriages and vehicles, and there was nothing really grand about it other than the side where Hitler spoke. And the grandeur was destroyed completely by the cars parked beneath the building.

We detoured through the Volksgarten to look for roses, and of course that didn't work. We continued our way back towards State Opera, and on the way we stopped by the Mozart statue to take pictures. Mozart was exploited commercially to the ultimate in Vienna you would see billboards and people in funny costumes asking us 'Guys, concert?' in every corner of the city, and needless to say, there were the available-in-every-part-of-Austria Mirabell brand Mozart chocolate which was not nice.

We stopped by State Opera to check where we could get standing tickets for the night's ballet. We were told to return at 6:15pm when they would start selling the day's standing ticket. At Vienna's State Opera, there is this Stehplatze or Standing Tickets that poor people like us could buy so that we could watch anything showing there for as low a price as 2.00 (limited-view) to 3.50 (full view) euros. Well, compared to the cheapest full view ticket (30euros) it was a lot of difference; however, there were also some limited-view tickets which cost 7 euros.

We went to BK for lunch after that; by that time our tour around Ringstrasse was over and we had moved on to the Inner Stadt. The Inner Stadt was one big pedestrian area full of cafes and shops and some interesting monuments. Its centre was Stephensdom, a Gothic church and famous landmark of Vienna.

We passed by Hotel Sacher and decided against eating Sacher Torte there due to the possible high cost. As we walked along, we stopped by numerous souvenir shops so that Tk could find his porcelain piano. Yj, despite not having any order, shopped a lot as well and saw an angel which he did not buy (on this day). I was the only person not interested at all; the only thing I bought from Vienna was a postcard with a simplified Habsburg family tree which cost 30cents.

We meandered through the route I pre-planned on the map; we visited some interesting sight and skipped some, and that mostly being those that admission fees were required. We went to the Donnerbrunnen, which I couldn't understand why Maria Theresa felt that the 4 statues representing the 4 main tributaries of Danube 'too revealing'; but we did not visit the Kaisergruft (Emperor's Vault), which was a place where the Habsburgs were buried after death. By the way, Tk (Yj to a certain extent too) did not like visiting these places where there were close associations with death so it would be appropriate to skip it.

Stephensdom the first Gothic church we encountered; it was already around in the 12th century and was rebuilt during the 14th - 15th century. They took crazily long to complete it; 75 years, and only the South Tower was completed with the North capped when half-complete as the court ran out of funds. Today the front gate belonged to the original 12th century church, and the roof was tiled with hexagonal colourful tiles, which was quite unique in Austria. The interior of the church was very different from the mostly Baroque churches that we had visited previously; it was mainly white and grey with decor that was very typically Gothic. The church was cavernous with a very high ceiling, nevertheless it did not look empty; on every wall or pillar there would be something, one famous example was the sulptures of the 4 saints that were the fathers of the church. Opposite the church there was this piece of wood studded with nails protected in plastic casing; it was thought that the wood suffered that fate as blacksmiths leaving Vienna in the 16th century would hit a nail into the trunk for good luck.

The souvenir hunt continued; we passed by Graben, a wide shopping street with the prague memorial in the middle; Am Hof; Judenplatz with the strange looking Holocaust memorial, which was a plain, stern structure called the 'nameless library'; Hohermarkt where a clock, which was supposed to chime and show figures running across its surface at 12pm, was located; and then we were back at Stephensplatz. At that time we were rather tired due to the train ride; hence we took a U-Bahn back to the hostel to rest.

The hostel generally and the room was very clean and neat. Despite the room being a bit small, it had enough space for us to hang dry all our laundry; there were individual bed-lamps and power points sufficient for everyone. The bathrooms and shower rooms were well maintained, the only fault being the shower being not strong enough. The staff was friendly and willing to help, and the place wasn't really noisy; there were even a piano and guitars for us to play around with. Very importantly, there were 4 Internet machines available!

We bathed, did laundry and slept for a while before we set off for Swan Lake. It was raining rather heavily at the time we wanted to set off, so we decided to wait until the rain stopped. Luckily it stopped on time to allow me to get to State Opera on time.

We did not manage to get the better 3.50 tickets, so we bought the limited view one. For dinner we settled at a pizza shop in the U-Bahn station, and to my delight, there was a piece of pizza with an egg on it! And of course I bought that.

The State Opera was very high; we were right at the top in front of the chandelier. 10% of the stage could not be seen from our angle. I thought that was not significant, but, apparently a lot of dance suites finished off at that part of the stage.

I have listened to the Swan Lake music pieces before but not the ballet. It was actually a very simple fairy-tale like love story; if you are interested you can find that easily in Wikipedia. Basically, the whole experience watching and listening was fantastic; it was worth putting up with the 3-hour long standing up. Actually, the standing was not a problem as there was a railing we could hold onto and we could sit down during Intermissions. It would be rather stupid for me to describe what I saw; it would be better if you can go there and experience it yourselves. The State Opera has performances almost every night.