Day 20 - The Esperanto Museum, Hundertwasserhaus, Kunsthaus, Seccesion Building

We started the morning by visiting perhaps the most unusual museum we have visited so far: the Esperanto Museum. This small and well presented museum has interesting items including books and memorabilia, and interactive exhibits.

We wandered down the popular shopping street of Mariahilferstrasse, and stopped into a boardgame store, Spielerei. We bought a small game called Hick Hack in Gackelwack (also known as Pick Picknic).

We caught the U-bahn out to an unusual building. The Hundertwasserhaus is a municipal apartment block in one of the most architectually uninteresting parts of Vienna. The artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser designed this building with several principles in mind: For example, tenants should be able to tell their apartment from the street so all the windows are different, and each apartment is painted a different colour. He also believed that a building shouldn't take land away from nature, hence the plants growing from the roof and out the sides of the building. He also put large golden onion domes on the roof because they are traditionally the perogative of the rich and powerful and he believed the tenants here deserved them, too.

We couldn't get into the building; it is a functional residential building, afterall. We still were able to marvel at surely one of the most unusual blocks of council flats.

One side of the Hundertwasserhaus.

A couple of blocks down the road is another building by the same artist, the Kunsthaus Wien, an art gallery. As it happens it was currently showing an exhibition of Hunderwasser's art, as well as an exhibition of HR Giger. Both exhibitions were very good. The Kunsthaus is obviously a natural and very fitting place to display Hunderwasser's work with its deliberately wonky floors, jarring colours and plants everywhere. Giger's work looked particularly dark in comparison.

A particularly suprising display was an Australian flag that Hundertwasser had designed to replace the current one (he had also designed a flag for New Zealand which is quite popular). We bought a small version of this Australian flag in the gift shop as an unusual souvenir.

The Kunsthaus, with Hunderwasser's New Zeland flag flying.

Our last stop for the afternoon was another art gallery, the Secession Building. The purpose of the building is to give avant garde artists a space to display their work. The facade of the building, and Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze in the basement are in Secession (Art Nouveau) style, but everything else was contempory art.

The Secession Building. The motto over the door translates as "To every Age its Art, to Art its Freedom."

Part of one of the installation works in the Secession Building, ELEVATOR by artist Dave Hullfish Bailey.

For dinner we headed a bit further out to a vegetarian restaurant called Hollerei which had very nice food outside under the trees. We also got the test the limits of of German-speaking abilities with the waitress.

Day 19 - Schönbrunn Palace

We visited Schönbrunn Palace today. This palace is in some ways similar to Versailles, which we visited a couple of weeks ago (read our blog entry, if you missed it). It's a large palace (perhaps not quite as big as the Chateau de Versailles) with large manicured gardens.

David in front of the Palace.

Evan in the palace grounds, with the Gloriette on the hill behind him.

We went in to pay our admission fee, and chose to get a 'Classic Pass' which gave us access to the 'Grand Tour' of the palace, the Privy Garden, the Maze and an apple-strudel making demonstration.

Our ticket gave us a time and a gate to see the palace, presumably to stop everyone going in at once (Versailles certainly wasn't this organised!). We had a quick look around the grounds before heading on in when our time came.

The palace was in a very good state compared to Versailles. Most rooms were in well restored and in good condition, and - shock! horror! - actually had furniture and other pieces. The personal rooms of Franz Joseph, in particular, were well displayed.

An interesting feature of the palace is that there are narrow corridors running between rooms. All the fireplaces faced into these corridors so that the servants did not have to go into the rooms and interrupt the imperial family to check on the fires and add wood. It was also nice to see many of the servants uniforms, and the various places where the imperial family ate meals - the tables were all set and decorated.

One of the many rooms on the tour is a memorial room to the son of Napoleon and Maria Louisa. The product of a political marriage, he became a 'political hot potato' (in the words of our audioguide) when Napoleon's empire collapsed. He spent most of his life (he died at 21) virtually imprisioned in this palace. In this room is an interesting painting of the boy, and a small stuffed crested larch - the boy claimed this bird was his only friend he ever had in the palace.

After our tour of the palace we headed up to the Gloriette. In the heat and burning sun it seemed a long way to walk, and a surprisingly steep hill - but we made it! We used our pass to get on top, which has good views of the gardens and surrounding city. We had lunch in the Gloriette itself, which was ok for a place targetted at tourists.

The Gloriette, built during the reign of Maria Theresa.

Back at the foot of the hill, we wandered through the maze, and eventually got out. We also visited the pretty Privy Garden adjacent to the palace.

The palace from the Privy Garden.

By this stage we were getting a little tired and were not really in the mood for the apple strudel show, so we gave it a miss.

We walked over to the Kaiser Pavilion which is a Secessionist-style (Viennese Art Nouveau) train station that was designed for the imperial family while at Schönbrunn. Unfortunately, it was closed today.

The Kaiser Pavilion.

Later that evening we had Japanese at a place called Yugetsu not far from the Opera. There appears to be many Japanese restaurants in Vienna, and this was recommended as the best. We can't comment on that, but it was a pleasant meal.

Day 18 - Exploring Vienna

Early in the morning we checked into our new hotel, the Wilhelmshof. The hotel wasn't as flash, and a little further out, but the staff were friendly and the room spacious. While at the hotel, we picked up a Vienna Card which is great value with discounts to many attractions and free use of public transport.

The first place we got to use our Vienna Card was at the Clock Museum. This small museum has some interesting pieces. One of the minders spoke very little English, but was very enthusiastic about some of the items and did here best to share that with us.

The clock museum.

After wandering around the Hofburg and the Volksgarten, we visited the Café Central (which our guidebook describes as the "most splendid of coffee houses in Vienna") for lunch. The food was very nice. For dessert David has the hazelnut mousse and Evan tried a Sachertorte.

Afterwards we headed back to the famous Neue Burg which houses the Sammlung Alter Musikinstrumente - the musical instruments museum - among other things. The collection of instruments here is huge with many historic or unusual pieces. We also had a quick look at the Hofjagd und Rüstkammer, the weaponry museum, in the same building.

Neue Burg.

A display in the musical instruments museum.

A joustling display in the weaponry museum.

To see a little bit more of the inner city, we hopped on the number two tram and did a few laps of the Ringstraße.

For dinner we went to a mostly-vegetarian restaurant called Wrenkh. This restaurant had three menus to choose from ("energy", "balance" and "beauty"). The food here was all very fresh and kept simple - a very nice change. Some interesting combinations of flavours here.

Day 17 - Travel to Vienna

Venice has been interesting, and we're glad we decided to visit. There are also things we still want to see, but we have had enough of Venice for the time being. The crowds, at least at this time of year, are too much. It's also exhausting to walk everywhere in this heat, and benches to sit down are scarce (let alone one in the shade). We have also gotten tired of the poor or even rude service at many of the cafes and stores here. Obviously you don't need to give good service or even good food to do good business in Venice. It's also too expensive to stay here too long - everything costs much more than anywhere else we've been.

After doing some errands in the morning, we went to the train station to catch our train. It was lucky we had arrived early, because when we arrived we noticed that the person at the ticket booth had given us a reservation for the wrong day! After typically unhelpful service from the ticket office, we managed to get a new reservation (at extra cost to us).

Deciding to have a drink at the cafe at the train station was a mistake. Receiving rude service from the waiter, we decided to leave without ordering anything. Venice had gotten too much for us.

On the train we had seats in different rows. We're convinced the ticketing staff at Santa Lucia station are hopeless - buy your tickets from another station, or online. The train was half-empty and we had unoccupied seats next to us, so we sat next to each other anyway.

Apart from that less-than-ideal start to the journey, the rest of the trip was pleasant enough. Having dinner in the dining car was a nice way to spend some of the time. Although we wouldn't rave about the food, it was made to order and tasted fresh - and was better than half the stuff we ate in Venice. We weren't sure what to expect from the dining car so it was nice to see tablecloths, full sized plates and real cutlery. The best thing was the stunning scenery.

A castle from the train window.

Arriving in Vienna we easily made our way from the train station to our hotel by catching the S-Bahn (city train syatem) a couple of stops and switching to the U-Bahn (metro). We were at our hotel in minutes.

A station of the very efficient S-Bahn.

For some reason almost every hotel in Vienna (ones that advertise online, anyway) seemed to be booked out for this night, a Tuesday, when we checked a few days ago. What we had to do in the end was stay in a more expensive hotel tonight, and switch to a cheaper one tomorrow. We're not trying to be martyrs, and we're sure you're not feeling sorry for us right now, but that's why we stayed in a more expensive hotel tonight. Our hotel for the night the Radisson SAS Style Hotel which is nice, even though it does have a bit of a generic international hotel feel.

For the first time since we arrived in Europe, our room had a bar fridge (although we didn't have tea and coffee making facilities). I don't think they understand the concept of the mini-bar over here - it was all complimentary. In Australia, at least, the mini-bar is used to squeeze as much money from the guest as possible. Needless to say, we ate and drank everything - we were paying enough for the room.

Our hotel room.

One thing we noticed is how quiet everything is around here, such a nice change from Venice. There's almost no-one about on the streets. Vienna seems to shut down at night.