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Wanderung 12

Boarding a Bus Bound for Budapest.

April 2006

April 20th; From Prague to Vienna, Austria

Our wake up call was 6:30, so it was another abbreviated night's sleep, but I suppose that the early start was intended to give us as much time as possible in Vienna later in the day. We all straggled on board the bus after breakfast and set out basically southwards through the Czech Republic to the Austrian border stopping only for a break at a McDonald's restaurant located at a rest area. At the border we were once again passed by with no more than a cursory glance and continued on our way to Vienna along a mostly 2-lane road that was surprisingly rough in spots. Our driver was passing cars, trucks, and even the occasional farm tractor with gay abandon, and I was occasionally getting excited even though I was way in the back of the bus and well away from the crush zone if anything happened. I later talked with the young couple who sat up in front that morning, and they advised us not to sit up there because it was too nerve wracking.

Along the way the scenery shifted from mostly pasture and farmland in the southern part of the Czech Republic to vineyards and farms with row crops in the northern part of Austria. We could still see communist era apartment blocks in the larger towns in the Czech Republic, identifiable by the plain design and dirty gray concrete surface. In contrast, the towns in Austria were the typical small German towns much like the ones we had seen in Bavaria. The only other noticeable shift was from the Czech language on signs to the German language.

John and Heather were sitting one seat back and John had lots of interesting business ideas like putting small radio transmitters on the various attractions in a city with recordings of what the building was and why it was important. That way, the tourist would just have to carry a pocket radio with an earphone while walking around the city and really know what they were looking at. It sounded good to me, and I guess you could have different languages on different frequencies to accommodate the variety of tourists.

Across the aisle from us, Roy remarked on the Czech language by relating the story of a Czech man who went to an ophthalmologist to get an eye exam. The doctor said, "Can you read the third line down on that eye chart?". The man replied, "Can I read it? I even know the guy!" What with plans to take over the world and jokes like that, the three of us got a bit rowdy and had to tone it down later so the folks who were trying to catch up on their sleep could nap a bit. Still, it passed the time until we reached the outskirts of Vienna and kept my mind off how close we were occasionally coming to other vehicles.

After Donato worked our bus through the traffic to the Schwedenplatz in Vienna, we all spread out to see the sights. Monika and I walked down Kaerntner Strasse toward St. Stephan's Cathedral, but we were waylaid by a children's shop along the way. Monika finally settled on two small dolls dressed in traditional garb for herself plus a dirndl dress and matching socks for our granddaughter Annalise. Escaping from the shop before I bought Annalise a matching pair of lederhosen, we continued to the cathedral without further detours.


 

The cathedral was very nice in a big old church kind of way. The central nave was a well preserved (or restored) example of the Gothic style with its soaring vaulted roof supported by narrow, tapering pillars. Most of the windows had rather plain colored glass in them and I presumed that the original windows had probably been destroyed by the bombing at the end of WWII. But some of the shrines and chapels along the perimeter of the cathedral had extensive gilt work and were quite pretty.


 


 

From the cathedral we continued down the pedestrian mall to the Vienna State Opera on the edge of the ring road that basically surrounds the inner part of the city of Vienna. Following the ring road we came to the Heldenplatz (Hero's Square), where we saw the inevitable statue of a hero mounted on a horse. I didn't recognize the hero, but the horse reminded me that the Spanish Riding School was somewhere in central Vienna, so we detoured over there to check if anything special was going on. Unfortunately they just had the normal daily practice sessions scheduled for the time we were there, so we gave up on that and circled back around the western edge of the inner city.

The architecture we encountered while walking around the inner city was diverse and almost always beautiful, but on a monumental scale. That is, each architectural style would be executed on some really large government building, palace, or museum. The Baroque examples often sported statues sprouting from a niche around the entry arches or doors of the buildings. Each building by itself was quite beautiful, but the cumulative effect of all the fancy architecture was sometimes rather overpowering, somewhat akin to an attractive woman wearing far too much perfume.


 

The streets of Vienna were also very different from the streets of Prague and what we later saw in Budapest. Vienna's streets were typically broad and straight, letting in a lot of light and giving me, at least, a feeling of space and airiness. In contrast the often narrow, crooked lanes of the old town sections of Prague and Budapest could occasionally give me the feeling of being in a maze made up of old alleys and buildings.

We arrived back at Schwedenplatz just before 4:30 and were ferried over to the Hotel Artis. After resting a bit we were ready to attend an evening concert at the Kursalon, a large building dating from about 1850 located at the southern edge of the Stadtpark (City park). The evening's program included musical selections from Mozart and Johann Strauss Jr. plus a couple of arias and ballet segments. We had a wonderful time, and I particularly enjoyed listening to Strauss's waltzes and gallops in the same hall where he himself had presented them in the mid 1800s. It was history come vividly alive, at least for me.

The music was so exciting and energizing that we decided to walk home through a mildly cool evening. You never know what you find when you walk in a city at night, and what we found in Vienna were some very pretty things along the way: a gilded statue of Strauss, a brilliantly lit bridge above a dark, still canal, and a huge water fountain being alternately illuminated by yellow, purple, and white lights. Besides seeing some unique sights, the walk cooled us off and calmed us down enough that we could get to sleep fairly soon after we got back to our hotel.

Copyright 2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
April 2006
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Epilog

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