A Place for Fish

 7/4

Arriving in Vienna

We technically left for this trip on the 3rd, taking the red-eye out of JFK for Dublin. We did our best to sleep, but that’s always a game of chance. Ava did surprisingly well at actually trying to sleep, so there’s that. Leaving Dublin at 6am and arriving in Vienna at 10ish, we had most of the day ahead of us.

It was a pretty straight-forward trip from the airport to the hotel, we stopped at a coffee shop on the walk from the train to the hotel - a viennese cappuccino and a pretzel seemed like a decent start to our time in Austria. The hotel was in the historic district, and we had a suite in a low budget hotel.

Basically, our goal since Catalina a while back is to make sure we don’t have to drink beer in the bathroom while we wait for Ava to fall asleep at night… so a balcony, extra room, separate hallway with space - whatever - makes it all much easier. Since we still want it cheap, that often means taking the nicest room in a kind of crappy hotel.

From the hotel, we just started walking. Ava’s face when she first saw the main cathedral is enough to have us start there.

I love churches, so it was a good place to start for me as well. The church, St. Stephen's Cathedral, is a lovely romanesque and Gothic cathedral. Inside was excellent and definitely worth the trip. We went up one of the towers to get a view across Vienna - which is a nice way to get your bearings in a new city. Of note, the guy operating the elevator had clearly picked the music, so bebop 50s jazz drumming livened the trip.

After that we walked a bit more, stopping at Cafe Illy for a quick coffee and pastry before wandering over to Michaelerplatz which is the entrance for the Homburg Wien and the Spanische Hofreitschule (Spanish Riding School). The school wasn’t in session while we were there, but I’d really like to see a performance if I were to come back.

We walked through the gates back through a few plazas, past the museums before heading towards the Rathaus. We’d come back to these areas the next day, but the walk is fantastic on its own.

Getting to the Rathaus (basically city hall), they had an outdoor area setup for a film fest with a bunch of temporary restaurants and such put in the park. I hadn’t eaten much at this point as pastries aren’t great for the egg averse, so we stopped for a beer and a nice brat with fries (which would become the norm going forward). It was actually very good. The Rathaus was being restored, and we weren’t planning on going inside anyway, but you could easily see how it was an impressive building.

We continued walking on and landed outside the Votivkirche and its Neo-gothic architecture. It was too late to go in, but they had a fun playground beside it, so I got a few great pictures of swing sets and jungle-gyms with a church background. Really quite a lovely building.

After a quick dinner, we called it a night to get a decent sleep on the first day.

7/5

A day in Vienna

We slept in a bit to get our internal clocks on a decent setting. We went to a nearby cafe for an absolutely delicious cup of coffee (Vienna is great for that for sure) and pastries then off to the art museum - the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. Impressive works heavily focused on art from the Hapsburg collections that showcase a bit of the old empire’s might. Ava stuck through it well enough, though was clearly ready to leave - even if I wasn’t. It’s filled with a lot of the art that is harder to find in the US - Van Eyck, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Rafael. Obviously other European cities have these works as well, but this one can at least be in a conversation with many of them. Plus, the museum itself is a work of art, just a lot to look at.

We left the museum, grabbed lunch at a lovely bakery and took the underground to the Prater Wien, which is basically Coney Island dropped in the middle of a residential area of a city. In 1873 it was the grounds for the World’s Fair and is home to the famous(?) Wiener Riesenrad Ferris wheel - which we went on, but I’m not sure I’d recommend other than to say you went on it. Ava loved this place, and so did I. We started off at the PraterTurm - the tallest ride in Austria and, when build, was the tallest swing ride in the world at 117 meters (383 ft). It’s no joke - and is way better than the famous ferris wheel. Even Ava enjoyed it, once we convinced her to go on it (that could have gone poorly). We followed this with the Ferris Wheel, so again, not the ideal order.

After lunch we hit up a few more rides. The bumper cars were notable if only because they felt like the bumper cars of my youth - when being strapped in, going in the proper direction, and strict avoidance of head-on collisions were never even considered. I rode with Ava and she drove, smashing into everything that was moving - a quick study for sure.

After a quick stopover at the hotel, we headed out for our latest night - to a concert at Peterskirche with a classical string quartet. Seemed required to see music while in Vienna - and while having a 6 year-old with a bedtime makes that more difficult, this was the best chance. When she’s older, we’ll hit up some operas and Philharmonics. It was great to see - and a concert in an old church - especially a classical concert is always fantastic.

7/6

Schönbrunn Palace

Schönbrunn Palace was the main summer residence of the Hapsburg rulers and EASILY rivals anything you’ll see throughout Europe. We only had this on the plan for the day, but figured we’d get back and have time for other things - but that would not be the case.

There are definitely a lot of different ways to see this palace as well, but with kids, there were plenty of engaging things that helped explore. In particular, we learned that Ava loves audioguides. I do too, so its not like its a wild thing, but while I like them purely as a learning tool, Ava seemed to like everything about it - pushing the buttons, hearing the music, listening to the stories. It really made the 60 minute tour easy to get through and enjoyable for all.

After the ‘Grand Tour’, we went to the Children’s Museum, which focused on interactive things and information on the lives of the kids in the palace, which was honestly pretty neat. I’m not sure if it was Sam or Ava who had more fun here.

We wandered to the back of the palace where you are hit with stunning gardens and every bit of how you’d imagine royalty of the time to live. There is a Labyrinth and Maze section that we entered, as we wanted lunch and on the map it looked like there would be a restaurant here (and this was the next area we wanted to explore anyway). Well, the restaurant turned out to be a very crappy vending machine and if we left, we would have to buy another ticket to get back in… so we just decided to risk hangry breakdowns and go through the whole area before heading to get something actual to eat. This ended up fine and the whole area was entertaining in the very least, but I’d go so far as to say it was just fun. [As a side note, the ticketing here is hard to figure out. And it will also depend on what you want to do, as there really are various ways to explore - different gardens, different sections, and each seems to need a ticket. The app really sucked for anything other than navigation, so my suggestion would be to use the website to buy the ticket package you want and transfer them to the app (it makes sense when you do it). We did not, and while I don’t think we really ended up paying extra, it was needlessly complicated.]

We headed to the cafe that is in the Garden Gloriette - which was used as a viewing platform and dining area for the palace - a common breakfast area for Franz Joseph I (longest-reigning ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - whose heir apparent, nephew Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated during his reign and would trigger the series of event leading to WWI). The views were great, and the food was good - Sam rates it as one of her top meals of Austria. After eating, the weather started to turn a bit cold and drizzly, so we left the palace via a different path through the grounds. Sadly, we didn’t really get to any of the other ticket worthy gardens, we simply ran out of time.

Once we were back at the hotel and Ava in bed, Sam and I exchanged time to go for night walks through the city. On my walk, I went back to St. Stephen's - which was open for night visitation and was amazing to see - as well as getting a great view of the art-project on the outside of the church - Billi Thanner’s Ladder to Heaven (it’s a bit too on the nose for me, but I love any church mixing itself into more modern art concepts). I walked through the historic center to the Danube (on the other side of town from where we’d spent most of our time), down along the river walk for a ways before turning back through the center to the Operahouse and eventually weaving my way back to the hotel. It’s a beautiful walk and was a really good way to close out our time here. I could easily spend a few more days here if we had the time.