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Had our main Vienna day today. Started by getting up early and blitzing the Natural History Museum, which was pretty much what we expected, but allegedly one of the best in the world. Lots of rocks and minerals to start off, building up to a Martian meteorite. We ploughed through all the evolution of Earth stuff and went straight to the dinosaur bones, which were immaculate. The dinosaur room had complete skeletons of iguanodon, pteranodon, allosaurus and diplodocus, as well as skulls of tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops and a life-size animatronic allosaurus. There were also complete skeletons of smilodon, glyptodon, and various other ice-age animals, which were in as-good-as-perfect condition. Anyway...obviously we enjoyed this room, and we were aware of time, so we walked quickly through the rest of the museum, which was essentially the biggest and most pristine collection of stuffed animals I've ever seen. The highlight was the bull elephant seal, which was literally as big as a bus.
After the museum, we walked to the opera house where we caught the first of the hop on-hop off buses to St Stephen's Cathedral, via all the stuff we saw yesterday, but this time with an audio guide so we learnt a bit about everything.
We went into the cathedral, but there was a mass in session, so we could only look through the gate at the back. To be honest, it wasn't a patch on some of the places we saw in Italy - very dingy inside, and as usual, you had to pay to see the treasure or anything else of interest. We decided to climb up the south tower, for a small fee. Not such an adventure as the Florence and Rome domes, as it was essentially one spiral staircase right to the top, with one brief landing. At the top was a gift shop (with no lift for workers) with some windows for views over the city. Vienna really isn't as picturesque as I thought it would be, and even the historic city centre has been spoiled with modern office buildings and tourism. So the views weren't anything to write home about, but you could see for miles, and the highlights were the Danube Tower (Austria's tallest building), and the Prater ferris wheel (Vienna's 2nd landmark, after the cathedral, which is basically a low-tech London Eye).
After the tower, we went to the Mozarthaus, a museum nearby that was like the Liszt museum but not as good. The whole set up was very sparse, with only a few pictures, facsimiles and period furniture (not Mozart's) spread over 3 floors. It concluded with a tour of Mozart's Vienna apartment, in which he wrote, among other things, the Marriage of Figaro. Apparently, his daily output was just 6 sheets of 12-stave landscape manuscript, which to me doesn't seem much, maybe it is. The main problem with the museum is the audio guide, which has far too much talking for each room, and not enough to see without reading paragraph after paragraph of blurb. Worth a visit though.
Next we visited the Stadt Park and took pictures of the monuments to Schubert, Lehar, Bruckner and Strauss II, which was surrounded by tourists getting their picture next to the statue.
From here we got the bus to the Schönbrunn Palace, one of the old Imperial residences of the Habsburgs, notably Emperor Franz Joseph I. We took the 'Imperial Tour', which involved following a concise audio guide around 22 of the best palace rooms, including the great gallery (ball room) and the Imperial crapper. Also, the very bed where the emperor passed away. We had a bit of a walk around the garden, which featured stunning flower beds and a grand but grotty fountain of Neptune. Also, interestingly, melanistic red squirrels, although I'm sure I saw a proper red one. Anna took great delight in the fact that a passing horse managed to spray a tiny drop of wee onto my leg. Realised we had misread the timetable and the last bus was in 10 minutes. We rushed back but must have missed the bus by seconds.
We took the metro back to town and went to the park next to the opera house to take a photo of the Mozart monument, then went on the bus for one last time, on the Danube route, which went around the Prater amusement park, the Danube tower and over the river itself, around some of the new developments in the east of the city. The commentary tried to make out that the Danube Canal was becoming more popular with locals and was a place worth visiting. In reality, it is hideous and a place to stay away from. At least the stretch we saw was. Predictably, the bus commentary was interspersed with Viennese muzak, bombarding us with all the Strauss chestnuts to make us feel more cultured.
Vienna is definitely a city to visit, but it would be better with more time and money than we have, as most of the attractions are quite pricy. Having said that, in the day-and-a-half we have been here, we feel like we have more or less 'done' Vienna, and we have all of tomorrow afternoon as well, but we are going to Bratislava for the morning.
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