Vienna

As mentioned earlier I am in Vienna and now have something to report, in case anyone is interested.

I am staying at the Hotel Post, which is a surprisingly affordable place... it has been around for quite a while [and it shows a bit], but it is a three star hotel for one-to-two star prices. And the breakfast is enormous and the staff are very friendly and helpful... not that I am trying to sell you, but it is always good to know a nice place in a city, in case one would like to go there some time.

The Hotel Post is, not surprisingly, right across the street from the post office... and what a post office it is! There is the regular old post office part, a philatelic centre, a bank, a telephone centre, a museum, a lounge, and a retail outlet [they sell all kinds of stuff, from the obvious... postcards, to the not-so-obvious... televisions. And the staff are very nice.

In Vienna [perhaps in Austria?] people don't say guten morgen, guten tag, and guten abend as greetings... they almost universally say "gruss got" [god is great], but don't mean anything by it, except to be friendly, judging by its almost universal application [I can't really imagine that the rather punkish young woman at the internet cafe is particularly religious, considering some of her tattoos, but you never know].

In my time here, I have seen a lot. I've also learned a lesson about reading the fine print... I went to the Vienna Secession, to see Gustav Klimt's Beethovenfries, but it was closed, because it was Monday... important information available to me, if I had only read the fine print... the other places I considered going on that day, The Belvedere and The Kunsthistorischesmuseum... both closed on Monday... so I looked through my information [reading closely this time] and found the Leopold Museum [no, it is not full of Leopolds], which had a great display of Egon Schiele and a number of Klimts as well as a whole bunch of other stuff... then, I went across the courtyard to the Museum of Modern Art, which was tremendous, including the building itself, which is made entirely of grey basalt and looks like a big monolith, especially against the fundamentally beigey-yellow of most of the baroque buildings in Vienna.

Today, I visited St. Stephen's, climbing the 350+ stairs of the tower, then the Kunsthaus and Hundertwasser Haus, both designed by Hundertwasser, with a cool exhibit about Jean Tinguely... then I made it back to the Secession and finally to the Academy of Fine Arts for a look at Bosch's Last Judgement.... with a bit of a walk and the climb up the tower, I think that I have earned my somewhat fattening middle-european repast that I am going in search of as soon as I finish typing this post. So far, I have had a couple of dandy meals, and one good coffee break at the Cafe Central, where I had coffee [duh] and an apricot dumpling, while listening to the live piano music, ranging from the traditional... Strauss, to the other-traditional... Billy Joel... all-in-all a pleasurable experience.

Well, I am off... the next update will be from Frankfurt, as I am heading that way tomorrow.

Auf Wiedersehen!