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| Schonnbrunn |
Because of our longer-than-expected Ljubljana visit, we arrived in Vienna quite late in the evening. Adam dropped us off at our hotel and went to find the Otto Wagner parking garage, our hotel's slightly subsidized parking.
In the morning, Adam was off to meet with his moot court team and my mission was to introduce the kids to my old haunting grounds. My secondary mission was to impress all my kids with my German language skills, sprinkled here and there with Austrian dialect. This was very easy to do because they don't speak any German and can't actually hear how pathetic my German has become these past 15 years. In the end, I'm sure I got us into more trouble trying to speak German to show off than if I had just spoke English in the first place.
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| On the Riesenrad |
We bought an unlimited public transportation ticket and headed for the Innenstadt, via the Rathaus, Parliament, and the Museums Quarter on the Ringstrasse. We went to St. Stephan's cathedral and climbed the 343 or 434 steps of the south tower for some amazing views. If you ask the kids what it was like climbing the tower, they'll tell you it felt like 15 steps. So living here in Rijeka on a huge hill had some payoff. With all the horses and carriages parked outside the cathedral, Lucy really wanted to ride in the fiacre until I told her how terribly hard the cobblestones are on the horse's hoofs.
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| Riesenrad |
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| Breaktime |
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| Wienerschnitzel (turkey) Love |
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| At the Prater |
We changed Serbian dinars at the Sacher hotel (because they don't want anything to do with that currency in Croatia), but unfortunately, never timed our walk right on the Karntnerstrasse to get torte. Fond though I am of Vienna, I wasn't sentimental enough to get Austrian torte for the children at 9AM. We walked down the Graben and sat at the Pestsaule (the plague column), and then headed for the Hofburg. They saw the silver chamber, the Sissi Museum (which fascinated the girls), and then we toured several of the Imperial Apartments where the Kaiser lived during the winter. We got on the subway and went to the Prater, stopping for pizza on the way, but no one would try my tuna pizza, which I would eat regularly as a student (although back then it was square, thick, and had corn on it). We rode the 19th century Riesenrad (a ferris wheel that goes around one time), built for one of Emperor Franz Josef's jubilees, and then walked around the amusement park. We went on the modern ferris wheel, because that was the best compromise between Lucy (who wanted to go on a really fast roller coaster) and Jonah (who gets sick on fast rides), with only one attending adult.
Around 4:00, with blisters on the bottom of my feet, we met Adam back at the hotel for a short break. All of us then went to St, Stephan's Cathedral to meet with the moot court team, and we went with them on the subway to the outskirts of town where the competition results were to be announced. Unfortunately, team Rijeka didn't advance and that was a huge disappointment for them and for Adam. The silver lining for me was that Adam got to spend more time with us in the subsequent days, but we both would have preferred that Rijeka advanced.
Since the kids were starving to death, we had to get dinner. I led us to a famous wienerschnitzel restaurant on the Burgstrasse, recommended in my guidebook. It was tiny and totally unequipped to seat five people at one table, but we squeezed in and after a beer, we hardly noticed we had no elbow room. The schnitzel was all it was hyped up to be, and by the time we left, Jonah was one of wienerschnitzel's biggest fans, begging us to tell him when he could have it again.
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| Lunchtime |
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| Schonnbrunn Labrynth |
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| Gloriette Cafe, Schonnbrunn |
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| Schonnbrunn Park (Gloriette in background) |
The next day was Schonnbrunn, where we spent a fabulous half day. The kids each got a little handheld audio guide and it made them feel like they had a toy, yet the toy was educational. Jonah learned all about the Pragmatic Sanction and Silesia. We must have gone through 40 rooms of the palace before the novelty of the audio guides started to wane. After we toured the inside, we walked up to the Gloriette behind the palace and the kid had an ice cream parfait, Adam had a torte, and I had a beer. We then went to the labyrinth/maze and the kids were entertained by the maze trails for quite some time. After lunch of sausage (and I had kasekrainer, cheese-injected into deeply toasted sausage, which was also a nostalgic food for me), Adam took the kids to the Schatzkammer (the Treasury) in the Hofburg to look at jewels and crowns. We went back to the hotel for a short break, then took the 38 tram to Grinzing for dinner at a heuriger. Although this particular one was recommended by our hotel, the service was awful. I drank two incredibly refreshing weiss gespritzers (this is half seltzer water, half non-aged white wine) which I used to drink a lot of -- and I decided that that drink is going to replace diet Coke as my new post-gardening summer beverage. We took the tram back to the hotel and fell into bed.
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| Electric boat on the Danube |
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| Danube |
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| Venus of Willendorf, Natural History Museum |
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| Schubert Geburtshaus |
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| My old apartment building |
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| Antique lift in our hotel (Pension Baronesse) |
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| Passing time on the tram |
Our last full day in Vienna started out with a walk to Harmoniegasse, in the 9th district, where I used to live. I hardly recognized the building, it had been so long. I did register the fact that the Best Western next door was new. From there, we walked to the Schuberthaus and managed to see Schubert's birthplace despite the annoying museum employee following our every move (we were the only ones there). We took a tram to the Natural History Museum, saw the 25,000 year old Venus of Willendorf, and then went on an electric boat in the the Old Danube. After the boat ride, we walked to a restaurant along the riverbank (actually, lakebank) and I continued to get reacquainted with the refreshing weisse gespritzers. Then we went to our only art museum, the Seccession, and ate dinner in Judenplatz (Jewish square), where a new Holocaust memorial has been erected since I lived there.
We squeezed a lot into three days, and came home exhausted. For me, it was exciting to revisit a place that was once so familiar and to introduce the kids to something new. It might have been better if I had a babysitter for several hours a day so I could see the things that weren't kid-friendly, but on the other hand, I really got to see what I most wanted to see, and eat what I most wanted to eat, and drink what I most wanted to drink... so it all worked out really well.
