Another Week or So in Vienna
Trip Start
Jan 09, 2007
1
13
31
Trip End
May 11, 2007
Vienna,
Austria
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Last Wednesday I went to the Augarten ("meadow garden"), which is pretty and has massive flak towers. It's close to the Prater, the giant park with the massive ferris wheel. It opens up in April. Thursday began a shifting a roommates, so I now live with my friend Jon, which has been working out well. Friday I went to the Naturhistorisches Museum (Natural History), and that was cool. I spent several hours walking though it - it's not only got a handle on the world's entire history, but it also is housed in a beautiful building. Apparently, this is a common theme here, as you may begin to notice in my commentary.
Saturday I went to the Albertina, a part of the Hofburg that is now an art museum featuring such a huge collection that they can only show fractions at a time. When I was there, they had a thing on Warhol's Superstar series, Baselitz's Remix series, Biedermeyer-period (early 1800s) art and furniture and stuff, and part of their permanent collection including some Michaelangelo, Egon Schiele, and Albrecht Dürer. Impressive stuff. Baselitz wasn't particularly great, and the Biedermeyer stuff was a bit hard for me to put together, but the Warhol and permanent collection stuff was cool. And the permanent stuff is housed in this beautiful hall; it's so ornate.
Augarten Flak Tower
After that I went to the Votivkirche, yet another big, imposing, and rather cool church.Sunday I went with Tim out west of town to this psychiatric institute entirely designed by Otto Wagner. This city loves this guy. He designed a significant portion of the U-Bahn stations and tracks, a giant bank, buildings all throughout town, and this entire instutional area. The focus of our journey was the Kirche am Steinhof, a really cool church at the top of the hill the institute is spread across. There's some nice paths and fields beyond the place, too. After that we went downtown and Tim showed me the bank that Wagner also designed.
Monday we had intended to tour the Rathaus, but we barely missed the tour. It's only in German, so me and Tim were planning to translate for my friend Sara. I'm going to try to translate for her on my own Friday. After that we went down to the Liechtenstein Palace/Museum, which is the big, beautiful palace once inhabited by the royal Liechtenstein family, and as they were extraordinarily rich, they collected a nice art collection. It was mostly kind of Rennaisance stuff that wasn't necessary my favorite kind of art, but it was famous, high-quality stuff. Tim also showed me a tea speciality store behind the Stephansdom and took me to the semi-famous Kleines Cafe ("small cafe").
I've spent a lot of time doing homework this past week or so, and I'm pretty well caught up, but I keep having more and more to do. Luckily there's only one more short novel to read for my English class (The Virgin and the Gypsy by DH Lawrence) and only so more drawings to do for my art classs. Hopefully next quarter will be a bit less homework-intensive. I was able to read my last German novel (Schachnovelle (translated as The Royal Game but literally meaning "Chess Novelle") by Stefan Zweig) in just a matter of hours, which was great. Now I have some thicker work to dig through. Alas.
