My Last Day in Haus Ober Österreich

In fewer than 16 hours I will be moving! For those of you who don't know, I have been living in a double room since May 11th with the world's worst roommate. I have had no privacy and no escape from his mess, smell, and paranoia about ensuring the door is latched shut. Tomorrow I am moving, along with all the other IAESTE students in Vienna, to the newly renovated Albert Schweizer Haus by city hall, which only contains single rooms. It'll be on par with Christmas!

On May 20th, my friend Megan mailed me a package. As the weeks went on we were both getting worried that it was lost in the mail, and I would have moved before it arrived. However, today, the last possible day for it to arrive, it did! When I opened the bubble envelope six wrapped gifts fell out. They were: gum, a small book of horoscopes, a book of word-searches, a Reader's Digest, a Man in the Iron Mask DVD, and the June 2007 Popular Science. There was also a card which contained pictures of a bunch of my friends from home. This random assortment of gifts made my last day in HOÖ even better. Thanks Megan!

Yesterday, when I should have been sleeping, I toured the far side of the Ringstraße. I checked out the Vienna Savings Bank, and Stadtpark.

The Vienna Savings Bank was designed at the turn of the century by Otto Wagner, who believed that all the other buildings on the Ringstraße were confusing architecture with archeology. He felt buildings should reflect the present, not the past. The bank stands out on a street of intricately detailed buildings with its very clean facade. The building is covered in marble using large aluminum bolts (a fairly rare metal at the time). Frankly, I'll acknowledge the building's architectural significance, but next to all the beautiful buildings in the area, I feel it just looks drab and uninspired.
On the southernmost side of the Ringstraße is Stadtpark, Vienna's version of Central Park. Although it is fairly small, it is very nice, with giant trees, large lawns, gardens, and sculptures. One of the highlights of my walk was the Johann Strauss II memorial.
There is a theatre in the park which plays Mozart and Strauss concerts twice a day, every day.

The majority of the Ringstraße is a wide tree-lined boulevard with wide sidewalks and bike paths. Its so nice to walk through the heart of a city shaded by a canopy of trees.
Last night Henrik, MA, and I payed €2.00 to see Mozart's 'Die Zauberflöte' (Magic Flute) at the State Opera House. We only stayed for the first hour, leaving at intermission, but it was very good. We only decided to go because I was running on 3h of sleep, and it was really hot on the 5th balcony. I'll definitely go back later and watch it again (to the end).

Alright, I'm going to continue packing!

Nothing like a 15+ hour workday

Right now its 5pm in Ontario, Canada, and people are just getting off work. However, despite the 6 hour time difference, I'm STILL at work! and have been since 8:45 this morning. The company I work for, ECHEM, has to submit a huge funding proposal tomorrow that could lead to the compnay doubling in size (and funding). Because my boss Rakesh and I are the only native English speakers in the company, we were asked to stay (at little late) and help edit.

The only good thing about this is that I got a free supper out of it, and if I end up working much later, I won't be coming in at all tomorrow.

One thing frightens me though, when I asked Rakesh how we were getting back to Vienna, he mentioned the 6am train. I really hope he was joking.

PS. It's now 2am and I'm still here...
PPS. It's 3:30am... and best case scenario home is still 1 hour away....

I ended up getting a ride home from a coworker, and thanks to an autobahn, got home by 4:30, in time to basically see the sunrise. And now, thanks to my well developed body clock it's only 9am but I'm wide awake, and tired. Maybe I'll have a nap in an hour or two, because I was planning on going to the Opera again tonight (Mozart's Magic Flute, €2.00), and don't think I could get through it with less than 3 hours sleep.

Sorry for the wait

Sorry that I haven't posted in so long. Since I've last posted really only 2 interesting things have happened.

Last Thursday there was a terrible thunderstorm with very high winds. The winds toppled construction cranes, ripped some roofs off some houses, and led to Barbara Streisand cancelling her much hyped concert at Schönbrunn. That day on my way home from work, I was sitting on the train when I heard a really loud bang followed by a loud scraping noise. I looked up from my book to see leaves whipping by the train, then coming in a window further down the compartment. Apparently lightning had struck a tree which then fell onto my train! The branches had brushed along the train until they found a partially-open window, pushed it down, and landed in the train. Needless to say we stopped, the ticketman came in, looked at the branches, and shoved them back out without really looking surprised. The one day to not have my camera on me! From what I heard the next day, I had it good. Due to trees falling on the tracks ALL the trains were delayed and some people who didn't leave work until an hour or two after me didn't get home until almost midnight.

On Saturday I went with the IAESTE people to Donauinselfest. It is the largest free outdoor music festival in the world, with 27 stages, and about 3 million people over the course of the weekend. You could find anything from Austrian Folk music to Jazz to Death Metal, it was pretty cool. We listened to some Austrian pop star for a while, then MA and I wandered around looking for something better. We never really stayed in one place, and decided to head back towards the U-Bahn station, and watch the fireworks from there, to beat the rush afterwards.

I have a picture that I took on the way back to the station.
The fireworks were really cool, with some new ones I've never seen before.

On Sunday I wandered around the city a bit with my book, then came back home and watched 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Citizen Kane'. If you're wondering why I chose those, it is because my boss, Rakesh, is a big movie fan, and told me about the new 2007 revised AFI's Top 100 American Movies list. When I discovered that I had only seen 25/100, and only 1 in the top 5, I decided to download some and watch them on rainy days (which we've had a lot of recently).

Alright, I should get back to work.

PS. I move in less than 94hours!

Vienna State Opera

Yesterday MA, Henrik, Ben (Scotland), and I went to the Vienna Staatsoper (State Opera) for the tour. If you're ever in Vienna, the Opera tour is the best €3.50 you can spend. The ticket got us an hour-long English guided tour and entrance to the Opera Museum. Here you can see the side of the Opera House and one of the fountains.
The design of the Opera was heavily criticized when it being built in the 1860s. People felt it was too modern, too plain, and lacked the dramatic impression necessary for an Opera House. The design was criticized so harshly that one of the architects even committed suicide before it was completed. Judge for yourself, here's a photo of the 'plain, undramatic' lobby.
The lobby is connected to the auditorium by a giant marble staircase. It was hard to get a good picture, but here's one from the second floor looking out over the stairs, which you cannot see.
The first stop on the tour was the auditorium. In 1945 the Opera was bombed by the Americans, destroying 90% of the building. The only parts remaining were the Lobby, Staircase, Intermission Room, and the Emperor's Intermission Room. The Auditorium was re-built according to the original plans between 1945 and 1955. There are 5 horse-shoe shaped balconies that wrap the main floor. The upper two balconies, and the central section of the first balcony are standing locations (which you'll hear about later). The central part of the second and third balconies is the 36 seat Emperor's box, which you can rent for only €6000.
The giant crystal chandelier:
This picture shows our tour guide and the immense stage and back-stage area.
Some cool things I learned about the Staatsoper:
- They have all their operas and ballets on rotation, and NEVER show the same one twice in a row. That means that every day last night's show must be dismantled, packed into trucks and driven to the storage facility on the other side of town. Meanwhile, that night's show is brought from storage and assembled. It takes a staff of 400 from 5am-5pm to change shows. The change includes lights, sets, curtains, backdrops, props, and costumes. This means that if you're in Vienna for 5 days, you could see 5 completely different full-scale operas.
- In their storage facility they have over 300,000 costumes.
- The stage has a complex hydraulics system which allows the main stage to be lowered 14m or raised 5m above the level of the rest of the stage. They can also perform a stage rotation where the main stage lowers, the backstage slides forward and another stage from beneath rises to become the new backstage, simultaneously. That allows them to change the entire set in a matter of seconds, in the middle of a show.
-The orchestra is comprised of 80 musicians, and is the feeder-orchestra for the Vienna Philharmonic.
- There are no microphones used, the singers just have to belt like crazy to be heard at the back of the fifth balcony over top of the 80 piece orchestra in front of them.

This is one of the intermission rooms. It has marble busts of all the big opera composers topped by painting of their most famous works.
This is a section of the Opera re-built after WWII. It is a ballroom/rehearsal hall. Yes, that's right, a rehearsal hall with 7 crystal chandeliers, it puts the BAC's Musitheatre to shame.
After we left the opera tour, we went down the street to the museum. It was pretty small, and all in German, but came free with the tour so no complaints here.
We walked home from the Opera through the Burggarten, which is located directly behind the winter Palace, the Hofburg.
This is a palm house and butterfly conservatory.
On the tour, our guide mentioned the Opera ticket prices. For any given performance they range from €2 to €150. The €2.00 tickets are for the standing places on the 4th and 5th balconies, and the €150 tickets are for the prime seats at the front. Last night 'Otello' by Verdi was playing, so Henrik and I decided to go. To get standing tickets you have to line up and buy them 80min before the show starts. We managed to get a pair of €3.50 standing tickets for the central section of the first balcony.

The show was pretty impressive. There was a main cast of 7-8 and a chorus of at least 70. There is a clip on the Staatsoper website. Click here then click on "Videobeispiel" beneath the photo. The show was over 2h long, but the little personal translation screens attached to the leaning bars made the time go by pretty quickly. As each season includes 20 or so shows, I'm going to try to catch as many as possible, they're too cheap to miss.

A Change in Plans

So, I'm not going to Budapest this weekend. My Colombian coworkers went to get their tourist Visas from the Hungarian Embassy (I love being Canadian, no Visas!). Unfortunately, Carolina's Austrian residency permit expires in August, and therefore she's not allowed into Hungary. Gotta love that logic. So, instead we'll go on the IAESTE Budapest weekend, after Carolina gets her residency permit renewed until February.

Starting in July there are trips organised by IAESTE every weekend until the end of August. The destinations include: Krakow (Poland), Rijeka (Croatia), Linz (Austria), Osijek (Croatia), Prague (Czech Republik), Budapest (Hungary), Leoben (Austria), Zagreb (Croatia), Graz (Austria), Hiking in Slovakia, Innsbruck (Austria), Wroclaw (Poland), and Split (Croatia). Obviously, I don't have the time or money to go on ALL of the trips, but I'm going to try for as many as possible.

Tomorrow I'm going on a tour of the Opera House, it should be cool.

Comments

A lot of people are telling me that they don't comment because they don't have/want a Google account. I was looking through the options, and I think I made it so that anyone can comment, without logging in. Hopefully that makes it easier for everyone.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Karlskirche, Zentralfriedhof

Take a seat, this one's going to take a while.

On Sunday I met up with Anna, a friend from Queen's whom I worked with as an iCon last year, and her housemate. They're traveling through Europe and were in Vienna until Monday. We were supposed to meet up at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Museum of Art History) when it opened, but the large lobby and groups of Japanese tourists led to us likely walking right past one another. I decided to tour the museum alone, and meet up with them at 1, which was our back-up plan.

I have already shown you the front of the museum, it is the one which is the mirror image of the Natural History Museum. Here's a picture of the Natural History Museum and Maria Theresa Platz which I took from the top floor of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. There are more pictures of the Maria Theresa statue later in this post.
The museum itself took almost 20 years to complete, which is not hard to believe, as it is a work of art in and of itself. All the walls are marble, and the ceilings are hand painted and covered in gold. The famous Austrian painter Gustav Klimt got his start paining the ceilings, which reflect his later work which relies heavily on gold embellishment. I couldn't decide which photos of the main entrance way and stairwell to include, so I included them all. One little disclaimer, there is a no-flash policy in the museum, so many of the photos are a little unfocused, but get the point across.
The hole in the domed roof looks up into the very expensive café on the second floor.
So here it is, definitive, albeit fuzzy proof that I am actually in Vienna. Apparently my camera couldn't figure out what to focus on, so it didn't focus on anything...
The first exhibit was ivory carvings belonging to the Hapsburgs. The amount of detail in these was astounding. Hard to believe that someone started with a tusk, and carved these. Especially when you consider that there's no room for mistakes, as you couldn't simply glue bits back on.
In this photo you can see the yellow-orange translucence of ivory. A lot of the pieces seemed to glow when back-lit.
One of the coolest pieces on display was this ivory ship complete with tiny ivory sailors. Sorry for the unfocused picture, but the low light combined with the glass cases made focusing near impossible without a tripod or the steady hand of a surgeon (which in my caffeine-addicted state, is far from the case).
There was then room upon room of incredible paintings. The rooms themselves were incredible, with 40 or 50ft high carved and gilt plaster ceilings. As I am as far from an Art-History student as you can get, this was one of the only paintings I recognised. It is the "Tower of Babel" by Pieter Brueghel. Here is a clearer version from Wikipedia. This is really an engineer's painting, because you get to see all the levels of structure and methods of construction; much more interesting than a portrait or a painting of flowers and a dead duck.
There were two artists in the museum painting copies of famous works of art. I sat for a few minutes and just watched them work. Having only ever painted with very unforgiving watercolours, it was terrifying to see them paint over 'finished' sections with large swaths of black, only to later go back and try again with the details. It was amazing to see how true to the original they could get. Apparently, the painter shown below talked to my friend Anna and told her that he thought Vienna was a disgusting city with no soul, built only to impress, as opposed to his beautiful home-town of Venice.
I took a lot of photos of paintings and galleries, but they all turned out really fuzzy. Some of the more impressive paintings were the giant altarpieces. There were two on display which were painted on single canvases easily 40ft tall and 30 ft wide, in giant golden frames.

The museum also contains a permanent exhibit of Roman, Greek, and Egyptian artifacts. The hall leading to the exhibit was lined with marble busts. Does anyone who lived with me at Queen's in first year think this looks remarkably like my neighbour, 'Toga' (Andrew Cardinal)? It kinda freaked me out.
The Museum was a treasure trove of plundered antiquities. I know it is wrong, but if it wasn't for the Hapsburgs taking all these artifacts from Italy and Greece, I wouldn't have been able to see them. Below is a display of amphorae from Ancient Greece. They were all painted in red and black glazes, with images of Greek gods, muses, and battles.
This picture shows the amount of detail that went into every ceiling, this is just one of dozens of rooms.
Just thought these helmets looked cool. The object in the centre is a mirror (in need of some polishing)
There was one room filled with busts of various people, ranging from this unknown boy to Julius Caesar.
This guy made me laugh. The circles are supposed to be ringlets of hair. When I think of ancient Roman senators, for some reason I don't think curly fro.
Julius Caesar and Octavian.
Every room was different, with styling matching its contents. This room held ancient Grecian stonework and mosaics. Notice how the arched ceilings look like the Roman ruins from Schönbrunn?
This guy has seen better days.The Egyptian section contains a number of large stone sarcophagi, may of which were in very good condition for being thousands of years old.
Everyone's a sucker for King Tut.
In a dark back corner, there was a collection of glazed tiles with no English description. I knew I recognized them from somewhere, but couldn't figure out where. When I got back, I went on Wikipedia and figured out that it's one of the 120 lions from from the Ishtar Gates, the gates to the inner city of ancient Babylon.
The intricately painted ceiling of the main room of the Egyptian exhibit is supported by granite columns taken from a temple in Egypt.
At 1, I waited outside for Anna and her friend, and took some pictures of Maria Theresa Platz, which is located between the two museums.
Thats Empress Maria Theresa on the throne at the top, with the Natural History Museum in behind.
When I finally met up with Anna and her friend I found out that they had toured the city with a guide book on Saturday and had therefore already seen everything I had prepared to show them. On Saturday Henrik had told me about visiting Karlskirche (St. Charles's Church), and how you could pay 4 Euros to go the top (the little cupola on top of the dome), so we decided to check it out.Here's the view looking up to the dome. The elevator to the right takes you to the horizontal platform, which supports the narrow stairway to the top. I know what you're thinking, "who would destroy a beautiful cathedral with this monstrosity of a tourist trap?" I later found out that it's only temporoary, and will only be in place until they raise enough money to complete the building restorations.
Here's some photos of the dome taken from the horizontal platform at the half-way point, which was still really high up. You wonder how the artisans could work up that high all day in the heat, supported only by wobbly wooden scaffolding.I don't have any photos of the city from the top, because a) the view was blocked by metal screens, and b) I was too terrified to take both hands off the railings long enough to steady a photo. Before you judge me, you must realise that there was a warning sign stating that only ten people at a time should go up. On the way up, we passed at least 15 people coming down, and as Anna is a civil engineer, and therefore has an informed opinion on structural safety, her comments of concern about how many people were up there freaked me out. I'm normally good with heights, just not when the whole structure bounces with people walking up the stairs, and I'm accompanied by a concerned civil engineer.

After Karlskirche we wandered around, and finally decided to go to the Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) where all of the famous Austrian composers are burried. On our way there it started to pour rain, and then turned into a thunderstorm, but that wouldn't deter us, for long.
After waiting out the worst of it in a crumbling archway fileld with tombs, we ran to the large central building, which turned out to be a giant church. Looking back from where we had come, we noticed a tourbus pull over to the the side of the main street. We decided that tour bus = the good graves, so we waited for the rain to slow to a trickle and went to investigate. All the composers are together, we had walked right past them.

Ludwig van Beethoven

A Mozart memorial, as his unmarked grave at St.Marx Cemetery was lost.

Franz Schubert:

Eduard Strauss I and IIJosef Strauss

Johann Strauss I

Johannes Brahms

More interesting looking graves of random people.

Now that the blogspot photo uploader is agreeing with my computer again, expect future posts to have a lot more photos like this one. Especially when I get back from Budapest next week. The only thing I ask is that you add a comment, or two, this is kinda like PBS, except I don't have Betty White to make you feel guilty.

PS. Happy Birthday Megan (today, 11th) and Craig (Wednesday 13th).