Western Vienna

Trip Start Jan 09, 2007

Trip End May 11, 2007

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Flag of Austria Vienna, Austria
Friday, May 4, 2007

Since getting back from Munich, I've mostly failed to actually get homework done. However, I did have a couple finals yesterday that I successfully studied for. Glad to be done with those, but I still have some writing to do, and it's hard to motivate myself when I could be buying records or exploring the Wienerwald (Vienna Woods). (If it seems weird to you that I had my finals a week before my final week of classes, you aren't alone.)

Yesterday after my exams I went downtown just to walk around and realize that I have a mere single week left in this town. I can hardly believe it. I love speaking German too much to go back to an English-speaking country! Anyway, after walking appreciatively past Stephansdom again, I went to the last independent record store I knew of but hadn't yet been to and then the two bigger ones on Kärtnerstraße (Corinthian Street - big downtown pedestrian street) in search of the cheapest copy of John Cale's latest live album, but it turned out that the cheapest copy I'd seen was the first record store I went in last week, so naturally I had to go back.

Today I decided to shun all pretense of productivity and head out in search of a few sights I'd heard of scattered in the western districts of Vienna. Side-note: I once heard Vienna was 50% green, and at that time I didn't know the geography of the city and I thought that was an outright lie. Now I know that it is true, but it's hardly a fair judgment when the city limits include several mountains, a fairly big man-made island in the Danube, a large part of a forest, a park as big as the Prater, and the entire 6000-acre Lainzer Tiergarten, a huge nature reserve.

Adolf Böhm Saal

(Plus there's the Stadtpark (City Park), Augarten (roughly, "meadow garten"), Belvedere gardens, and Schönbrunn zoo and gardens.) It's no wonder it's so green when the city limits are as huge as they are. Whereas in St. Louis (or even Kansas City), the suburbs are bigger than the city itself, and I claim to live in either city despite being several suburbs out, in Vienna, you can live deep in the forest, with the quaint German-style housing that I'd totally been missing out this whole time I'd been here, a good two hours' walk from the nearest U-Bahn stop, which itself is still 15 minutes by "bahn" (subway) from the city center, and still say, sure, I live in Vienna. This is because Vienna expanded its city limits to include more suburbs, not once, not even twice, but three times (although the third time they realized how overzealous the plan was and they rescinded most, but not all, of that final expansion). Think of St. Louis absorbing St. Louis County, East St. Louis, and every other suburb or nearby town you can think of (maybe even Mascoutah or Wentzville, why not) or Kansas City expanding out past where I live in Olathe. Anyway, that was a long sidetrack just because of a jaded statistic.

So anyway, today I went all the way to the aforementioned last U-Bahn station, and since I literally walked out of the station as the bus that I wanted that comes every 70 minutes pulled away, I figured I'd just walk to where I was going. (It couldn't be that far, right?) I had two destinations in mind, and I actually was surprised how quickly I found the first, the Otto Wagner Villa, built by the famed Jugendstil (German Art Nouveau) Viennese architect that I'm sure I've mentioned before for his own use. It was later bought by the rather eccentric artist Ernst Fuchs and now is a private museum containing his art. It was simultaneously weird and beautiful and thus sort of like a dream come true. After that I headed up what was basically an inhabited mountain in the Wienerwald in search of the Jubiläumswarte, an observation tower on top of the more-or-less mountain that overlooks the city and forest. It didn't take all that long and the view was worth it. I then climbed all the way back to the U-Bahn station and took a combination of subways and regional trains (S-Bahn) to get to the last station in city limits before heading in the direction of Wiener Neustadt (basically New Vienna) and Graz, which is where I'm going tomorrow. From that station, I took a bus for a while to the middle of the residential area, at which point I wondered the rest of the way up a foothill to find the Kirche zur Heiligsten Dreifältigkeit (Church of the Holy Trinity), aka Wotruba Kirche, named after its famous/crazy architecht. Worth it. Then I came home, tired and ready to avoid doing homework again.