Vienna. Such a city! It's not hard to believe that it was one of the centers, and at one point, the center, of the Western world until World War II. The city itself has an air about it that is unbothered and not willing to impress, although it knows that it certainly does. It feels more relaxed in Vienna than in Munich, for example, although I'd say that the Bavarians are perhaps the most laid-back (generally speaking) of all Germans. My impressions of relaxedness perhaps coincide with the arrival of spring, which is the instant cure to opening up any exasperatedly fed-up person getting over the sheer darkness and misery of winter. After hours of delays, I arrived at Wien Westbahnhof midday, and my friend Joshua met me on the train platform. I must have looked like death, having slept very little the night before, and after a long train journey. We walked to his apartment, in the Neubau district of the city (the 7th district out of 23 total), and enjoyed a cup of tea and fruit. Upon feeling refreshed, we headed out for a stroll in the Innere Stadt, which is the heart of the city, encircled by the Ringstrasse, or Ring Road. We walked passed the Museumsquartier, or a collection of museums which include the Modern Art Museum (MUMOK), the Leopold Museum, the Museum of Architecture, and the Tanzquartier (Dance Quarter), where a new modern dance group is now based. We also passed through the Hofburg, the enormous palace complex and home of Vienna's former royalty which included (and was pretty much contained to) the Habsburg family for centuries. Although it's quite impressive, I knew that I was more interested in visiting Schloss Schönbrunn, the summer palace of the Habsburgs, and the permanent residence of Empress Maria Theresia among others. Hofburg is now full of various royal-themed museums, such as the Albertina (a massive art museum), the Spanish Riders' School (a horse show put on by famous stallions), the royal apartments of Sisi, or Elisabeth, the empress wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, and other important buildings. We continued along one of the main thoroughfares of the Innere Stadt, which is Maria-Hilfe-Strasse, and it lead to the Graben, or a sunken ditch dug into the middle of the city, built to protect the Innere Stadt from invaders ("Graben" in German also means moat, but I don't believe that this particular Graben was full of water/dragons that keep watch). Stephansdom, or St. Stephen's Cathedral, is a beautifully soaring cathedral that is comprised of Gothic and Romanesque architectural elements, and sits directly in the center of the city. It is enormous, and has a beautiful organ in the back, along with numerous columns, altars, paintings, and everything else that a fancy-schmancy major European cathedral normally has. Joshua and I tried to scout out flying buttresses while encircling the cathedral, but this was to no avail. We tried to figure out how the cathedral handles its weight, or rather, how it is distributed, but alas, we are in the end but violinists, and not engineers.
Joshua and I went to a wonderful Israeli falafel joint called Maschu Maschu, and although our waiter wasn't extremely friendly, he wasn't nearly as bad as friends have described Vienna's service to be. The food was great, in any case. Joshua departed for his violin/music conservatory/practice session, and I was left on my own to wander through the Innere Stadt. I somehow found myself on Annagasse, a street full of instrument luthiers, and continued on the Ringstrasse. Joshua had told me that the southeastern part of the Ring was a bit boring, and it would be better to just head to the northwestern part of the Ring near the Rathaus (City Hall - it looks like Cinderella's castle or something else out of a fairy tale). Of course, I ended up in the southeastern corner. Sigh. Leave it to me to find the boring part of a district. Back-pedaling brought me to the Staatsoper, the home of the Vienna State Opera, where on Friday, April 1st, the conductor I formerly played under in Essen, Stefan Stoltesz, was set to conduct a performance of Madame Butterfly, which will be premiered later in this month in Essen. I suppose it would have been sort of funny to run into him, although he would have had no idea of who I am. The Staatsoper is a wide and voluminous building, with a "I'm here to stay and dominate forever" sort of massiveness. It is beautiful, though, and I would have liked to listen to a performance there. Next time.
I also sauntered by the Parlament (Parliament) Building and its surrounding gardens, the Volkstheater (for straight theater productions), a Mozart memorial/monument statue in the Burg Garden, along with a Goethe statue near the garden's entrance, and snaked my way back to Joshua's apartment through Neubau's funky and modern nightlife.
Vienna isn't an especially clean city, at least in comparison to most German cities that I've visited. The Viennese are supposedly famous for not cleaning up after the poop of their millions of dogs. I have an American friend who was utterly disgusted with Vienna for this reason - among many, but this was a prime one - and finally threw in his hat, moving back to the U.S. I didn't notice such a massive problem with poop of any sort during my visit, but I suppose it's because fines for not cleaning up have become steeper since my friend left the city. However, the dirtiness of a city rarely bothers me. I spent a lot of my childhood in Indian cities, which are, well, far from clean. It's as my old professor, Frau Mathé, put it, while describing why Swiss cheeses and chocolates taste (sometimes) better than what one gets in the super-regulated and food-law oriented EU: "Ein bisschen Dreck ist doch gut. (A bit of dirt is indeed good.)"
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