Anne's visit: A Recap

Anne and I had a whirlwind week together, joined by Matt when he wasn't at work.  We visited the Hofburg Imperial Palace, which is just a few blocks from our apartment.  Here is Anne under the Swiss arch
I was struck by the detail of this statue.  Look at the expressions on their faces:

Other highlights of Anne's visit were seeing Don Giovanni on the huge screen at the Rathaus including good food and beer.  My favorite so far is a brown ale by Ottakringer called Dunkles.  The food vendors are only at the Rathaus for July- August - sad because it is delicious, cheap, and they have everything.

This building is amazing - for half of the opera I was looking at the architecture instead of the screen. And nearly every seat was filled at first (although it emptied out a bit as the 3 hours went on!) - and we heard quite a few people singing along, enforcing that Viennese know their opera.

After dark it looked so stunning with a few of the lights on.  Just a typical town hall.

We also toured Schloss Schonbrun, the royal "hunting lodge" and grounds a bit outside Vienna:

Our tour guide here was awesome - the antithesis of dry fact repetition.  My head was swirling after the tour and I wish I would have written this immediately to remember more.  He was psycho-analyzing members of the royal family, putting the story in amazing historical/cultural context, and just really bringing their history to life in such a witty way.  

This structure is on a hill overlooking the main building.  Apparently Empress Maria Theresa (the only woman ruler during the Hapsburg dynasty and Marie Antoinette's mother) had people carry her up here every day for breakfast when the weather was nice.  Every ruler added more to the building, including painting it yellow, which is now famous worldwide as "Schonbrun yellow."

And of course, we had breakfast at a cafe in the Naschmarkt:

We also FINALLY figured out the city bike situation (we were confused about getting the bikes out of the stall until Matt helpfully told us the trick) and rode out to the island in the Danube.  There are all of these floating rafts for public use, so we found an empty one and sunbathed for a while.  So fun!

This guy below was waiting for his chance to claim the raft - he kept slowly sidling by in his boat.  Also a nude sunbathing friend shared the raft with us for a while - a rather portly man who kept jumping off and sending a wave of water over us.

Finally, we spent 2 great evenings in Grinzing having dinner and wine at the heurigen (wine taverns) Matt mentioned.  On the first night both had live music with people dancing and clapping and singing along - really getting into it.  

The "themes of these songs invariably revolve around the quality of the wine, the act of wine-drinking and its consequences, Vienna's beauty, a nostalgic longing for the past, the transitoriness of life, the inevitability of suffering and death at God's will, and, to a somewhat lesser degree, romantic love." Doesn't that sound fantastic?  It made me wish we had something like it in the U.S. - these are obviously songs that people grow up knowing and they create a bond.  There is Matt chair-dancing along.

On the tram:

The famous Viennese Sachertorte: