Sunday In Vienna

On Sunday morning, we said our goodbyes to some new friends and left the River Duchess. It's neat how you can become friends so quickly sometimes. We hung out most often with a couple from Tennesee and another two couples from Australia. Now we are thinking of doing a driving trip to Tennessee in the fall of this year and possibly an Australian adventure the following fall. 

Since we were doing an extension of the cruise with Uniworld, we were met by a local host named Christian. He had been with Uniworld before retiring and now worked for them in this new capacity. He was excellent in getting us set up at our hotel and then taking us on a walking tour. His knowledge of the city and its history was impressive. Our first stop was at a large statue of Beethoven were he told us about the composer's life and times in Vienna. 

There are numerous streets and squares named after famous composers in Vienna, which is known as The City of Music. 

We moved on to an old school building where we learned about the darker side of Vienna. The Austrians were apparently fairly staunch supporters of the Nazis and many Jews were taken from the city. The school was the first to allow anyone to attend, including Protestants and Jews. Previously, schools would only accept Catholics. In 1938, many teachers and students were taken from the school and sent away to camps. This sign on the school indicates that they remember the ones who were taken.

We moved on to the House of Music which is a museum decicated to famous composers who were born or lived in Vienna. We had a little test and Marilyn got most of: Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Mahler and Strauss. I think I got one because we had just seen the Beethoven statue! There was a room dedicated to the life of each of them and a lot of interesting information was presented.

Beethoven in his younger days!

This piano was made in London for Beethoven.

 

The church seems to have more power over here. Even in a major tourist centre like Vienna, most things are closed on Sunday. Even though it was Mothers' Day, many restaurants were closed and the ones that were open were swamped. We had a rather expensive lunch in a cafeteria styled place and when we came out, it had started to rain. And it rained constantly for the rest of the day. We had our rain gear but soon our shoes were soaked but we kept going because you only have so much time to see what you want to see. We took a bit of refuge in St. Stephen's Cathedral. It was another fairly dark church but it was still very imposing.

The rest of our day was soggy. We stopped by the park near our hotel where a food festival was going on. It was not too festive. There were lots of stalls with food and drink from all over Austria but there were very few customers. We were thinking of having dinner there but it was closing at 5. 

We met up with our Aussie friends for a beer and then walked back to our hotel. On the way I took a few rainy day shots with my phone.

Golden Strauss in the rain! (I thought it was Mozart)

When we arrived at the hotel, we were cold and wet and decided we didn't want to go out again to find food. So, we ordered a pizza from room service and had a couple of the beers that Marilyn had bought a few days earlier. We also had some cheese that we had gotten at the festival and were cutting with the little knife on my cork screw. Not as classy as our dining on the ship but it was comfort food!