Day 19 - Vienna, Austria

We just so happened to be in Vienna on a Sunday, so we started off our day with Mass at Stephansdom. Stephansdom is a huge gothic cathedral in the center of Vienna, dating from the 1300s, its most distinct feature is its tiled roof.

After mass (in German) we wandered around the Inner Stadt (city center) along the main shopping streets of Kartner, Graben, and Kohlmarket and saw the baroque church Peterskirche. Vienna has quite the cafe society, and Austrians drink a lot of coffee. We stopped at Cafe Demel mid-morning for our first melange (kind of like a cappuccino), apple streudel, and sacher torte. Sacher torte is a dense chocolate cake made famous in Vienna because it was a favorite of one of the Hapsburgs.

After our snack, we headed to the Hofburg, the winter palace and imperial court of the Hapsburgs. From here they ruled the Hapsburg and later Austro-Hungarian empire until World War I. We took tours of the Kaiserapartments, the part of the palace where Emperor Franz Joseph and Empress Elizabeth lived, the Sisi Museum, and the Imperial Silver Collection.


Included in the ticket price were audio tours of each museum (Yippee!). Here's Brian looking super-enthused 45 minutes into the Imperial Silver Collection tour, as he listens to the story behind the 47th placesetting we've seen.

After the Hofburg, we wandered around the Ringstrasse (an inner ring around the city) to take in some architecture. We saw the Kunsthistoriches and Naturhistoriches museums, the Neueburg (the new wing of the Hofburg), the Volksgarten, the Burggarten, the Burgtheater, Parliament, the Univerisity of Vienna, and the Staatsoper (State Opera House).

In the afternoon, near a statue of Mozart in the Burggarten we stopped at our first Wurstelstand (think hot-dog stand but better). They have all kinds of sausages, such as frankfurters, bratwurst, burenwurst, currywurst, and even sausages stuffed with cheese. You can get them sliced or in a roll - but they don't just slice the bun open. They have a contraption that makes a hole through the center of the roll, then they drizzle some mustard inside and then slide the sausage in - quite an efficient bit of packaging.

Later in the afternoon we headed down to Karlsplatz to take in the baroque church Karlskirche, dedicated to the end of the plague in the 1700s.
We capped off our night with a Mozart and Strauss concert. We heard Eine Kliene Nachtmusik and the Waltz of the Blue Danube, among other songs, performed by a string quartet.