Day 17: 28/04/06 Vienna

Our only cooked breakfast! I know it looks sad but we were quite happy about it...

View of Vienna from Schloss Schönbrunn

Inside Kunsthistoriches Museum

We had been talking about cooking our own breakfast since we saw this group of people cooking dinner at the hostel in Luzern. It realised here in Vienna: we bought packets of mee goreng and sausages from a supermarket nearby and created our first and only self-cooked breakfast. It wasn't exactly nice but it was a welcomed change after days of bread/ham/cheese/butter/jam breakfast. The 2 Korean girls cooking together with us were even more powerful: they had kimchi instant noodles with brocconi. I seriously thought they brought the kimchi noodles to Vienna as I didn't see it being sold anywhere...

There were only 2 places that we went to today: Schloss Schönbrunn and Kunsthistoriches Museum. Both were huge places and took us quite a lot of time to see the whole of both.

Schloss Schönbrunn (Palace of the Beautiful Fountain) was a pleasure palace built by the royal family in the 17th century and was extended and renovated at the 18th century under Maria Theresa. It was the place where the last Habsburg emperor, Charles I, abdicted in 1918 after they lost the First World War. The palace itself has 2000 rooms, and behind it is a great garden which includes several fountains and a little hill from which the whole of Vienna can be seen. As usual, the palace was not built to its planned scale due to a lack of funds.

In order to tour the interior of the palace we were supposed to join a guided tour, which was what I planned to do. However, when we reached the palace, both Tk and Yj voted against visiting the inside of the palace after knowing that we had to pay for the tour. Apparently they were not exactly interested so I went along with them.

We visited the gardens though. The front was actually rather similar to Schloss Nymphenburg of Munich, with a main road in the middle and flower beds on both sides. At the end of the front part was the Neptune's fountain, and behind it was the hill. We climbed up, took some photos of Vienna, came down and walked around the sides. There were some more fountains and that was about all the we saw. The only thing interesting was the rows of trees shaped like walls and tunnels to partition the paths leading to different parts of the garden.

As we were visiting the gardens, it started to rain quite heavily. Yj, the hero, did not have an umbrella and his jacket was not waterproof; so he depended entirely on Tk's umbrella. Tk was rather upset about Yj not taking care of his umbrella as he was always throwing and turning Tk's umbrella around when he was holding it.

We had lunch at the same place in the U-Bahn station as we did the night before. Tk and I bought a sushi set, soup noodles and prawn tempura rice to share; Yj bought another piece of pizza from the same stall. After our lunch we proceeded to Kunsthistoriches Museum.

Kunsthistoriches Museum was one of the best museums in Vienna; the collections inside were basically the art collections of the Habsburgs in the past. GCS said that it was impressive and indeed it was. However, we visited it because I did not want to alter the plans; both Tk and Yj actually had voiced out that they did not find visiting this kind of art museum fun. Anyway, I was glad that I did not listen to them this time.

I will not describe the exhibits there as there were too many and it was not appropriate for me to do so. The most prominent exhibit there was the golden salt cellar brought to Vienna from Innsbruck; it was originally supposed to be in Schloss Ambras. The ground floor mainly consisted of artifacts and statues, e.g. Greek statues and Egyptian mummies; the first floor were all mainly 17th - 18th century mannerism/baroque paintings. Do not forget: the building and its decor is a piece of art by itself.

When I was there, half of the ground floor was closed, and that was why I could finish most of it by 6pm. If not, I would need the whole day to finish it: the scale was smaller but comparable to Deutches Museum. The audio-guide was very important: initially I thought that wasn't necessary, but after 2 halls of incomprehensible German explanatory texts I was forced to pay 2 euros for the English commentary. Although it did not include explanation for all exhibits the audio-guide was excellent; I got a really good art history lesson from it (from the point of view of a person who has extremely limited knowledge of the subject). At the last hall the audio-guide protested and hanged itself as I forced it to work too hard.

Tk and Yj finished the whole thing much earlier than I did as they didn't have an audio-guide. Yj needed to revisit a shop to buy an angel for his sister (as claimed by him, nobody knew exactly who he was buying that for, and nobody had ever seen the angel) so he left the museum first. We got him to wait in front of Stephensdom at 6:30pm, hoping that he would be able to navigate himself there on time. Tk went around the whole place with me again, but I believe there should be some instances in which he was sleeping on the couches :)

We left the museum at around 6:15pm to meet Yj for dinner. We walked through the Hofburg and came across this ruins site at Michaelerplatz where we stopped for a while. I guess we got Yj worried (probably worried that he was waiting at the wrong place?) that we received calls from him which we purposely rejected, hoping that he could get the hint.

We hunt for a dinner place using the guide I had; however, the first place we went to did not exist (the address given was the site of a church!!), and we walked to the other side of Inner Stadt to find another one we picked from the guide. Luckily it was around.

The cosy restaurant was somewhere around Am Hof. It served rather good food: I had a beef stew, Yj had a veal Wiener Schnizel (which was supposed to be original as opposed to pork), and Tk had some pork as usual. The veal Wiener Schnizel was not as nice as the pork one. We had coffee: Melange for Tk and cappucino for me, and dessert too: Apple strudel, and pancake witth nuts and cream. The coffee was good, one of the best I've had; however, for apple strudel I still prefer those I had in Singapore which was cold and crispy. The apple strudel there was entirely different: it was hot and soft, and not sweet.

Over dinner we had Yj's story No. 5:

The conversation started with talks about what Tk would be doing in DSTA and he rose a point where he might run into some problems in terms of security clearance when he ceases his service as he might be dealing with weapons dealing and rather highly classified information. Yj disagreed with that point, and asked 'why should there be a problem'. He then rose some highly incomprehensible points which he was very sure of (e.g. 'if you are just a middleman linking the weapon-maker and weapon-buyer together the governments would not know your identity as you work anonymously' (?!!)') and he even claimed that he knew people doing such things. When asked who these people were, he just gave me a company name which I cannot remember. Tk's worry might or might not stand but Yj's claim (highlighted in red) was simply too deep for me to understand. It might possibly be true in a utopia where intelligence networks do not exist.

We were 'chased' out of the restaurant as they needed our table for some reserved guests. Anyway, it was good as we needed to rest early. We were supposed to wake up very early the next day to take a cruise down the Danube.