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Wow. Vienna.
Actually... I was more like, oh poo, it´s raining.
I arrived in Vienna on Wednesday morning, after yet another overnight train experience - nothing particularly eventful to report. I was lucky enough to get a carriage with two other girls - the first got on when I did, and we slept across the seats on each side of the compartment. Another girl joined us partway through, unknown to me - when I woke up she was in a sleeping bag on the floor! Probably more comfortable all round, really.
So anyway - wow, Vienna. It really is such a grandiose city. Beautiful, ornate, Baroque, and so full of music history! Mozart, Strauss, Brahms, Beethoven, The Vienna Boys Choir, and operas galore. My kind of city, really! Beautiful and clean, and not so big that it you don´t feel like you don´t get to know the place, or feel like you are continually lost. And to complete this perfect city, it has a castle. Can´t have an awesome European city without a grand castle. I think that out of all the cities I have visited on my trip, Vienna is the city where I could picture myself living. Not sure what I would be doing - studying or working. But I do know this - I would be busting out my bad German left, right, and centre!
After a lazy afternoon and night settling into the hostel, I woke relatively early the next morning (8am - I´m on holidays!) to find it was raining again (which is when I said ´oh poo´). But I braved it. I was so keen to see this beautiful city that I sloshed around the city with my miniature travel umbrella and non-waterproof jacket until after lunch, when my sopping wet socks got the better of me. As much as I love my black slouchy boots, they really aren´t water proof - I have worn the toe of each boot down so that the fabric inside is showing, thus allowing the water to seep in. I´m thinking of doing a DIY repair job involving a black Nikko pen and some super glue...
I managed to see St Stephen´s Cathedral, which is an amazing Gothic, gloomy looking cathedral with this fantastic high vaulted interior, and ornate sculptures and statues adorning the interior and exterior. While it is still a much used place of worship today, it is absolutely jam-packed with tour groups, so much so that they had to install these iron gates to herd them all out when it is time to conduct mass. There is also a little tourist help desk set up next to an alter, and there is even a gift shop where you can purchase your own little St Stephens keyring or even Mother Mary postcards. As tacky as it is, I suppose it is a great way to raise the much needed funds to maintain the church. I really wanted to see the St Stephen catacombs, which hold various remains and entrails of human life, including those of the royal Hapsburgs of Vienna. Creepy! But unfortunately every time I tried to see them, they weren´t open, regardless of what the opening times indicated - seems they were running on Spanish time!
Next I had a wander around the Hofburg complex, which has various museums and galleries, the national library, the Spanish Riding School, various churches, and also happens to be the seat of the Austrian president. All very lovely, but not so pleasant when completing the tour in wet wooly socks. That evening I enjoyed a lovely home cooked meal of vegie stir-fry - with my $4 jar of sweet and sour stir-fry sauce! A little extravagant, I will admit. And I can´t forget to mention the $4.40 packet of two minute noodles I added into the mix - I couldn´t believe the price when I actually bothered to look at the price tag!!!
The next morning I headed to the Mozart Museum! The first museum I was actually WANTING to go to! It´s funny the way that Vienna capitalises on the fact that Mozart composed for a few years of his life in Vienna. If anyone has a claim to his fame it´s Salzburg, which is the town about three hours west of Vienna, where Mozart was actually born and grew up a child prodigy. But there are these souvenir shops all over Vienna called ´Mostly Mozart´ which sell these yucky marzipan chocolates with his cheesy face plastered on the foil wrapper, music paraphernalia, and other slightly Mozart related items.
But all that aside, the Mozart Museum was great. It is housed in the apartment where Mozart lived during the time when he was most successful - he composed The Marriage of Figaro in that very apartment, which is a very exciting thought! There gave you this nifty little audio guide to explain each room and the life of Mozart as you walked around, which was very helpful. As I walked around the apartment I kept thinking, this is the room where he may have wrote this song! This is the window he would have looked out of and was inspired by the scenes below! Here´s the entrance where he greeted his important guests, such as Hadyn! The museum also had lots of cool relics of his life, such as a piece of manuscript where he had written a note to one of his students - ¨I will not be home this afternoon, so please come back at 2pm tomorrow¨, signed Mozart. I almost squealed out loud with excitement - I certainly did so in my head! There was also the opening program for The Marriage of Figaro, and excerpts from the score, along with other articles such as Mozart´s marriage certificate. A little more sobering was the bronze death mask taken of Mozart when he died - a little creepy, but still very interesting to see.
Again, I tried to visit the catacombs, but with no success...
I was going to the opera that night! The State Opera of Vienna, to completely exact (how posh am I?!). I love musical theater, and had studied operas in school and vocal classes, but had never had the opportunity to actually see one live! Operas in Vienna are supposedly a grand affair - fortunately, cheap arses like myself can get standing room tickets for less than $8! But it does mean you have to line up for almost two hours before the show (called Faust) starts to get a ticket. And it does mean that you aren´t actually assigned a place to stand, which can be very upsetting and frustrating for some people (giggle)! After we had all been shown to the small area where about 100 of us were to be standing for the show, we were instructed to check in our coats, visit the bathrooms and to get drinks before returning to our small balcony before the show starts. Some people (who had obviously done the standing room thing before) had bought along colourful scarves and ribbons and marked their standing ´spots´ by tying them to the bars in front of where they were standing so they could return to the same awesome spot they had staked out. After everyone had returned this old dude was standing behind me, while I was chatting to this middle aged couple, one from Canada, the other from England. The old dude must have been talking to me in German, but I wasn´t taking any notice until he said loudly in English, can´t you understand me?! I turned around and said, oh sorry, I didn´t know you were talking to me. He then proceeded to rant and rave about ´crazy tourists who think they can line up for one hour and get a good spot in the standing room´, blah blah blah. Even though we were standing in the isles, he had tied a piece of red string to the bar to his left, and assumed that that meant people would know that he was standing about 50cm to the right of that bar. Oops, sorry mate! He kept ranting and raving and elbowing me out of the way, while the helpful English man grabbed me and his Canadian partner so that we wouldn´t end up elbowed down the staircase! If you´re going to get so upset about all this, then why don´t you book a seat, sir?, I said in my sweetest, most condescending voice. In my head, that is. This Hayley doesn´t speak up when trouble is a brewing - she just clams up, nods and smiles. And giggles in this case! What a joke! What a silly sausage! There were a bunch of Canadian girls in front of us too, and they were giggling away at the ridiculousness of the situation. Why would you book a cheap ticket when you obviously know how crowded and pushy it gets, and then get upset about it? That´s the nature of these things, isn´t it? Just got to go with the flow. Turns out that when a better place opened up a little closer to the stage, the silly old man proceed to shove forwards, abandoning his much fought-for and sacred place next to me. I felt like tapping him on his shoulder and saying, whoopsie! Silly me has accidentally pushed you further down the isle and away from your precious spot! Let me just swap you, so you can get back to enjoying the view from this spot up here, ok?
I was actually fairly disappointed with the opera, to tell the truth. Not that I´m a huge opera connoisseur - the music was nice, the singers were very talented, but there wasn´t really any story line to speak of. Quite boring, really. And the interior of the building wasn´t even very spectacular - for the State Theater in such a beautiful, ornate city, I expected to see something a lot grander. In fact, I´d say that the Lyric theater at QPAC in Brisbane is nicer! To make matters worse, I ended up having to listen to a lot of the show from the floor. After standing for nearly three hours, I started feeling faint - my vision started going black, my skin started tingling, I started sweating, and I got this strange ringing sound in my ears. Not wanting to fall over and knock that silly old man and give him something real to complain about, I promptly planted my bottom on the steps where I remained for a good ten minutes before slowing standing up to watch the rest of the show. Not long after popping up my head was it spinning again, and back down I went. The Canadian girls next to me thought that I had a brilliant idea and decided to plonk their bottoms down next to mine (they mustn´t have been enjoying the show either!). When intermission finally rolled around, I decided I couldn´t really take another two hours, and left the theatre. I think that is the first time I ever left halfway through a show, except for the time I went to see Napoleon Dynamite (worst movie ever). So home to bed I went. Aren't I exciting?
Saturday was my last day in Vienna before catching an overnight train to Italy to meet up with Mum in Cinque Terre, Italy. I decided to round out my grandiose city tour with a visit to two of Vienna's cemeteries to visit some of the city's most accomplished musicians, followed by a tour of Vienna's grand castle.
First was the cemetery St Marxer Fiedhof, Vienna's principle cemetery from 1784 to 1874, and the resting place of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (I have always thought he has the coolest name! There was actually a guy at my last job called Wolfgang). The cemetery is creepy. It is overgrown with trees and bushes, and during my visit not one other person visited. Now, I don't think ghosts really exist, but I felt so conspicuous during my visit, like I shouldn't be there - like I wasn't welcome. I kept repeating over and over in my head (just in case they were hearing my thoughts!) 'I come in peace, I don't want to disturb any of you', as if I was communicating with some alien race. Seriously, the dead must get so sick of tourists traipsing over their resting grounds to visit some larrikin musician. Mozart got so into gambling during his last few years of life that he had lost all of his possessions and money, and was basically given a paupers mass burial upon dying. So instead of actually visiting a grave and knowing that six feet below lies Mozart, they have erected a memorial over the mass grave to acknowledge that somewhere in that vicinity Mozart's body lies. After paying my respects, I hotfooted it out of there, making sure not to stand on any particularly crunchy autumn leaves and disturb the slumber of those residing below me (how silly am I?!).
Vienna's main cemetery, Zentralfriedhof is a completely different story. It is huge, and very well maintained. You can purchase a map of the cemetery at each gate, and there is even a tour bus that will transport you through the immense grounds. All of the graves a grouped by profession (how practical of them), so it was fairly straight forward finding the graves of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and the Strauss family - just follow the hordes of Japanese tour groups! It seemed almost too well planned that the musicians who would go on to become the most well known musicians of Vienna were all buried in a neat little semi-circle facing onto the main boulevard of the cemetery. I started to doubt whether they actually lay there, or whether some careful re-organisation had taken place somewhere along the line.
Last, I visited the Schonbrunn castle complex, the imperial summer palace of the royal family. Wow. A beautiful, pastel lemon coloured castle sits in the middle of the huge grounds, surrounded by innumerable formal gardens, glasshouses, a zoo, a maze, museums and even a marionette theatre. While I didn't visit the interior of the castle (too expensive for this traveler), I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the grounds taking in the grandiosity of it all. I should have been born a princess, really. I think I could hack the lifestyle.
My overnight train to Cinque Terre was one of the funniest trips I've made. The train was fairly crowded, and I ended up in a cabin with two funny old Austrian grandmas, a younger Austrian woman, and this oblivious Italian girl (I don't think she was altogether upstairs...). As the train pulled away from the station, the occupants of my cabin got comfy for the twelve hour trip, which included the removal of coats, shoes and such. The two grandmas appeared to be making a girls tour of Europe, and they seemed to be having a grand time! They were cracking jokes in German, giggling and carrying on. I was sitting in my seat with my legs crossed reading my book when the slightly crazier of the two decided to test her flexibility and imitate my position. Well, her legs were all over the place as she tried to maneuver her legs into the crossed position, accompanied by lots of giggling. When she had succeeded to the best of her ability, she turned to me grinning, trying her best to look comfortable with her new position. The hilarity really broke loose when the oblivious Italian girl decided to take off her shoes - her feet absolutely reeked! And the grandmas made to attempt to hide the fact that they were much perturbed by their odor. They were pinching their noses, waving their faces in front of their faces, exclaiming in German, tripping over themselves to stick their heads outside of the cabin in an attempt to catch some fresh air. All the while, the Italian girl didn't seem to notice any of their antics! It really did stink, but I was lucky enough to be sitting next to the door, catching wafts of air every now and then. Even people walking past our cabin screwed up their faces and looked in our direction in disgust. Eventually one of the grandmas tapped the Italian girl on the shoulder, pinched her nose and made a 'phew!' sign, and motioned for the girl to take off her jacket and place it over her offending feet. The girl looked confused, but complied. It didn't help. Even me spraying my deodorant around the cabin couldn't diffuse the stench.
I had a strange experience with the border control police upon entering Italy. We had to hand over our passports for inspection like usual, but the police officer didn't like the look of mine. I had accidentally got it a bit wet in Paris - you could still clearly see the photo of me, but some of the ink had seeped through to the previous page. He must have thought it was a fake, because all of a sudden he was shoving a pen at me and instructing me to write my name, my city, my birthday, my signature. He still wasn't satisfied when I could provide him with the details. Eventually, he shoved my passport in my face and pointed to the ink stain on the page. He didn't speak much English, but I said 'That's what happens when it gets wet' - I couldn't hide the 'Are you stupid?' look from my face though. He reluctantly shoved the passport back at me, and stormed out of the carriage. Hmmm.
One last anecdote to top off my overnight train experience. As I was getting of in Florence to change trains to Cinque Terre, I said in my best German 'Tuess!' to the Austrian ladies, which means 'See you later!'. To which the called out cheerfully 'Hello!'. Ha!
Talk to you soon!
Love Hayley x
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