A Night At The Opera
Trip Start
May 07, 2005
1
48
117
Trip End
Ongoing
Vienna,
Austria
Saturday, October 8, 2005
The next day we started off on foot down a large shopping area. We bought a new pair of pants for Kim, the first new pants in 5 months. Then we decided to have lunch at a pizza place we discovered the previous day. It was just as yummy as expected. Kim really likes the cheap-but-authentic pizza places. In Italy it is the best. You walk up, point at whatever looks yummy, they will cut as big a piece as you want and then weigh it. In the big cities in Europe there are plenty of Ristorantes where the owner speaks with an Italian accent and the pizza is good and cheap
1. St. Stephens Cathedral
. After lunch we headed for Stephans cathederal. It is yet another wonderful gothic church. The legend is that a master builder appeared in a dream to the duke with plans for a church. The duke took it as a sign from God and started building. The master builder was the same man from his dream. On the day the church was consecrated the builder disappeared. Legend says that the builder was Jesus Christ himself. The church was wonderful but the best part was a tour of the catacombs. They have a new part and an old part. The new part is kept up and priests and cardinals get buried there. They have many urns from before formaldehyde. When someone was entombed his organs would be perserved in alcohol. One church would get the heart, another the brain. St. Stephens would get the intestines.
The old part was more dark and spooky with rooms full of bones. There was one room filled with bones from Black Plague victims, which is unique because most cities buried them outside the city. There was also an osstuary. When the catacombs became too crowded monks would clean the bones and stack them neatly. Weird.
After the church we went to the hall of music
2. Catacomb Exit
. It's a museum decided to understanding sound. It had four floors. The first was about the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which they believe is the best orchestra in the world. The second floor described how people perceive sound and it had a lot of great interactive exhibits. My favorite was about consonance. The third floor was about favorite composers who lived in Vienna. Beethoven was my favorite there. It also had an interesting exhibit where the Philharmonic was on a computer screen and there is a conductor's baton that you can use to direct them. It was cool - you could change the tempo, volume, and even direct specific instruments. If you do a bad job they stop playing in the middle of the song and get mad at you. The fourth floor was full of strange interactive sound devices. One device had four sensors for different types of sounds (like a car engine, wind in a tree, etc). You used your hands to create more or less sounds from each sensor. Another device had you sing. The more calm and pure you sang, the better it would accompany you. It would also play a video that differed depending on your singing (like a flower that would bloom or die). Lastly we saw the opera. It was L'Elisir D'Amore starring Anna Netrebko who is apparently very popular. The opera sold out the first day tickets went on sale four weeks ago. By comparison most shows don't fully sell out until the day of the performance. We somehow found out that standing room tickets go on sale 80 minutes before the show but where told that the line would start forming at 6am. We were in the area at about 6pm (two hours before the show) and the line wasn't too long. We bought the "expensive" tickets for €3.50 and waited in line to claim our spot. The ushers tried to keep peace but once they started letting us in we had to fight with old opera-crazy Austrians. One there we were supposed to mark our spot with a scarf but we used a rainjacket and a belt
Apfel Strudel Class
. The seats were excellent, however, only slightly inferior to the €157 tickets.The day before the show when we learned it was sold out a scalper tried to sell us tickets. He told us how great Anna Netrebko was and how great the opera house was. The tickets were too much and we were showing disinterest. Finally he asked where we were from. When we responded "Texas" he shrugged as if to say, "oh, the performance would be lost on you" and he went away.
On Saturday we had a slow day but we did see Schloß Schönbrunn. It's a big palace from the Hapsburgs. Originally it was ordered to be larger and more impressive than Versailles but the plans changed. It is still very large and impressive. We took the tour which went through 40 of the 1400 rooms. We saw the garden and hedge maze. We saw a demonstration on how to make apfel strudel and got a free sample. Then we headed home for a nap and made fish and veggies for dinner.
