Wanderung 32

Our morning tour involved a slow drive through congested traffic to the ring road around the old center of Vienna, and then a stop at Hofburg Castle, the Winter Palace of the Hapsburgs. The Winter Palace was actually a collection of buildings that had been added to by various emperors, each in a unique architectural style that was the fad at the time. The conglomeration of all those wildly different styles, however, kind of hurt my eye, really.

Once off the bus, we walked through the courtyards and gates of two of the Palace buildings to the far side where the Spanish Riding School was located. There we lucked out because one of the morning classes was ending and the horses were being returned to the stables across the street. The horses crossed right where we were standing, and one of the horses turned around to pose for pictures right in front of Monika, who was ready to take the picture. This was clearly the horse's idea, not a prompt from the groom, and it appeared to be because the horse wanted to show off for, or get attention from, the people standing there.

From the Palace we walked down a broad, pedestrianized boulevard to St. Stephens Cathedral, with our guide pointing out historical sites and stores on either side. The historical site information was interesting, but info about Tiffanys and other shops does not excite us very much. After the tour ended, we had our tour guide take a picture of our group.

Then we had some free time where we toured St Stephen's cathedral. As you might expect, the cathedral had an impressive interior which was, however, currently undergoing renovations and therefore partially covered with screens, making photography difficult.

Then we set off down the shopping street, looking for an electronics store to get a micro USB charging cord. We found one at an Apple Store, but they wanted 15 Euro and we thought that was just too much. But in a general telephone store across the street, we found a unique micro USB charging cord that you can plug in either way, and they only wanted 7.90 Euro for it, so we bought that one instead!

Catching the bus back to the ship, I then took a nap because we had scheduled an evening concert and I really wanted to be awake for that! That turned out to be a good decision, because I was wide awake for dinner with the family later that afternoon and did not fall asleep during the concert, which would be extremely embarassing!

The concert was located in a pretty little gem of a concert hall, complete with a grand staircase and decorative fountains. The performers consisted of a pianist, flautist, and string quartet playing a selection of Mozart and Strauss pieces, which is about as good as classical music gets. Some pieces included vocal sections, which where sung by a very competent male baritone and a female soprano, and we had rather expected that some of the pieces might include vocal lyrics.

But what was totally unexpected was that three of the pieces were choreographed with very beautifully done, intricate ballets performed by a ballerina and her male partner. I mean, it was a quite small stage as you can see from the picture below, and I just didn't think there would be room to perform a ballet on it! We were sitting in the third row back, only about 15 feet from the stage, and we could clearly see the pure athleticism of their performances, which they made look effortless, of course. Equally impressive was choreographing for those ballet pieces, which had been designed to fit the front half of a stage about 30 feet wide by about 15 feet deep. But the swinging arms of the ballerina on some of her pirouettes barely missed the bows of the string quartet players in back at several points in the performance! All together, it was very enchanting to watch! Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed during the performance, so all I have is a picture of the empty stage.

The drive back through nighttime Vienna was very interesting, and I tried to take pictures of illuminated buildings along the way. Photography was difficult as it was so dark the exposure was over 1 second , so I could only take decent pictures when the bus stopped at a red light! Since by then we were exhausted and had an 8:30 meeting time for the morning tour of Bratislava , Slovakia, the next day, we turned in immediately after we returned to the ship. But what a night!