So, because I had to take an overnight train to Rome/Florence, I only had about twenty-four hours in Vienna.  I wish I had stayed at least another half day.

On Friday afternoon//evening I decided to take my guidebook’s advice and go to this Austrian vineyard just outside of town.  Poor decision.  It was almost 90 degrees farenheit and humid, and I had to sit on a tram without air-conditioning for forty minutes and walk around for about a half hour to find the place just to find out that it’s a regular restaurant that sells wine they made in their vineyard.  The wine was great, but no one there spoke any English at all and I ended up just pointing at something on the menu hoping it was food because I was starving.  It turns out I ordered some fancy block of goat cheese.  Great.

Saturday was much better.  I started off right with my first real breakfast in a while and hopped the train into town (my hostel was in like the armpit of the city).  I spent most of the day doing a hop-on-hop-off tour which was nice because I got to see pretty much everything there was to see.  I also walked around and went back to some things I wanted a closer look at like the Opera Museum, Butterfly House, MAK Museum, and Café Central.

The MAK Museum was so cool!  Well.  I like weird things.  So you should take that with a grain of salt.  The MAK has exhibits on things like furniture, porcelain, oriental rugs, metal, architecture, and lots of other seemingly ordinary things that you don’t normally think about.  What I like most about this museum is that it finds the interesting in the ordinary, which is what I feel like I’ve spent my life doing.  I highly recommend stopping by if you have the chance.  It was actually free admission when I went.  (AWESOME)

Café Central is one of the most famous cafés in Vienna, and they have a lot of cafés.    This particular one was once frequented by Lenin, Trotsky, and Freud who were all known to meet here for chess games.  I was just going to get an espresso, but then I saw the word “goulash” on the menu and I was sold.  MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.  Really though.  Who can turn down a good goulash?  It was sooooo tasty.

I also managed to run into another gay pride parade.  It’s like they’re following me haha

Everything in Vienna is beautiful.  Every building is architecturally stunning and ornate.  There are statues on every corner.  There are more public gardens than you can count.  And the city is on the Danube River.  SO PRETTY.

So, I just spent about a half hour going through and putting captions on all these picures, and the internet crapped out when I clicked save.  SO.  Enjoy the pictures for now, I’ll put captions on again when I stop hating European internet connections.

I slept in a little bit yesterday which was absolutely woooonderful, and a little difficult since the sun comes up at like 5am here.  I walked around with my friend Stuart from New Zealand all day again, which was nice because he actually knows where he’s going.

We went to quite a few places.  We started back at the Topography of Terror so we could finish looking around and reading everything.  I highly recommend that exhibit to anyone visiting Berlin (and it’s FREE).  Then we made our way over to the Jewish Museum.

The Jewish Museum combines architecture and clever displays to force you to engage yourself.  It’s actually really interesting.  The way the main part of the museum is set up, when you walk in you become very disorientated because the hallways are set up in a zigzag formation and the floors are all slanted.  It’s very symbolic of the Jewish mindset at the beginning of the Second World War.  The displays are all inside the walls, and you have to almost press your face against the glass to be able to see them and read the captions, further engaging you.  Down one of the zigzags, you can enter the “Holocaust Tower.”  You have to open a large, thick metal door, and when it slams behind you, you find yourself along in a triangular, very tall, cement-walled room.  It’s very very dark with only a dim light from outside.  You can faintly hear the goings-on outside, but in the end you know you’re all alone.  It’s bone-chilling.  There’s also the Exile Garden.  Here, you have to walk on hazardous, uneven cobblestone through giant, slanted cement structures topped with willow trees.  It’s beautiful and significant.

After the main part of the museum, there’s a large exhibit on Judaism, which was interesting, but after the emotionally-draining first part of the museum, my attention span was at an all-time-low and I whizzed through the 150+ displays.

The next stop was the East Side Gallery.  Here, artists took over the last remaining strip of the Berlin Wall and reclaimed the space by painting beautiful murals signifying joy, remembrance, confusion, and the willingness to rebuild.  I think it’s amazing that most of the paintings have remained unmarred for so long.  My favorite portion had a caption which read, “Many small people who in many small places do many small things that can alter the face of the world.”  I included a LOT of pictures of the gallery so you can get an idea of what it looks like.

We ran over to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis, but it was closed.  I think I’m going to try to stop by again today.

The line for the Reichstag was absurdly long, so we skipped that and made our way back to the hostel to find everyone else.  On our way past the Brandenburg Gate, we got stuck in the party end of the giant Gay Pride Parade that had taken place earlier in the day.  It was so fun!  Lots of people were dressed up and dancing and just having a really great time.  Once we got through, we took the U-Bahn back to the hostel, met up with the rest of our group, and walked over to the nearby industrial beer garden.

The beer garden is actually in an old bombed-out train depot in the middle of nowhere near our hostel.  They turned one of the old bomb shelters into a giant rock climbing wall and most of the rest of the area was just full of chairs and tables and big screens playing the World Cup games.

Another great end to another great day :]