Artie & Susie Schwarz

Dear Artie and Susie,

We wanted to thank you for helping make our honeymoon the adventure of a lifetime. Because we wanted to share photos of your gifts, we decided against sending more traditional thank-you cards; instead, below is a picture gallery of what your contributions made possible!

<nerdy statement> A decade's worth of psychological research suggests that experiences make us happier than material possessions. </nerdy statement> Because we're fortunate enough to share a home with the appliances and furniture we need (IKEA furniture, but hey), we opted for a less traditional spin on wedding registries. It was our hope that a Honeyfund would offer a month's worth of incredible experiences—from dinners to sightseeing, from train tickets to hotel rooms—that we could directly attribute to the loved ones who made those experiences possible. We even carried a spreadsheet with us everywhere we went that indicated who had sponsored each activity, which helped guide us through each day.

Please enjoy the photos and captions below! If you'd like to see more pictures of our honeymoon travels, you can view the full gallery here.

Thank you again for your generosity and friendship, and for making this first chapter of our marriage possible.

Love from,

What you sponsored: Sightseeing in Vienna

Thanks to you, we had three lovely days of sightseeing around Vienna. The weather couldn't have been more perfect, and we mixed Rick Steves's self-guided audio tours with the age-old practice of just wandering around and getting hopelessly lost. My favorite part of our time there was finding Hanny Deutsch's home at the turn of the century. Below are photos of what you made possible!

St. Stephan's Cathedral—culturally considered the center of Vienna. Locals explained that a common meeting place for all ages is the Stephansplatz, the large cobbled plaza in front of the cathedral that's now crawling with men in Mozart costumes, trying to sell tickets to lower-quality classical productions.

We went through two Rick Steves audio tours of the cathedral alone—one for the complex interior, and one for the beautiful stone and tiled exterior. The interior is an amalgamation of centuries of different architectural styles, government regimes, plagues, and attempted takeovers (e.g., by the Ottomans; a cannonball is still visible on a wall as a reminder of that particular siege in the 1680s). We saw the chapel where Mozart got married, and along the outside of the cathedral, saw framed picture after framed picture of the devastation the building experienced during both world wars.

We particularly loved the stained glass.

You can tell which parts of the cathedral have been power-washed to remove the grime and pollution. As you can see, they haven't quite finished.

Demel, a famous chocolate company that opened in 1786, and which served Empress Sisi herself during her time in the city.

Another shot of Demel. We had our final breakfast in Vienna upstairs in what seemed like an old living room or lounge, with its almost Parisian décor and poufs and curved footed tables and gilded mirrors. I finally tried an apfelstrudel, and Ryan got a slice of chocolate cake so sweet that the waiter politely warned him twice just how sweet it was. (Needless to say, he didn't touch anything else with sugar for the rest of the day.)

We got a few chocolates to go...

The entrance to the Kunsthistorisches museum, just down the street from Demel on the Hofburg complex. It's dedicated to history ranging from ancient Egypt to eighteenth-century Italian painters.

In the ancient Greece wing of the museum.

By that point in the day, our lower backs were aching so badly from walking so slowly through museum after museum that we stretched out on the lawn in front of this building, right in the shade of a massive, tear-shaped shrub for a full hour. It was heaven.

One last shot of Kunsthistorisches. It was beautiful!

You can spot Ryan toward the left, looking studious.

We started off our second day at the Albertina Museum, just across from the opera house and the Monument Against War and Fascism. The Albertina houses "modern" (read: avant-garde) art stemming back to the 1700s, from Picasso to Egon Schiele.

In fact, there was a huge Egon Schiele exhibit while we were there, which was fascinating to go through. (We'd gone through some of his works together while in a bookstore in Portland years and years ago, and a print of one of his many self-portraits hangs over Ryan's desk, but otherwise we knew very little about him. Dude was messed up, but his art was cool.)

Looking studious with Schiele, pt. 2.

My favorite part of the museum was discovering an artist I really love, who Ryan also enjoyed enough to dub him "a new favorite": Franz Sedlacek, a thoroughly depressed Polish artist whose work is a perfect mix of creepy and amazing.

Another favorite from Sedlacek.

Belvedere, a multi-part museum housed in the beautiful and expansive Belvedere Palace, whose gardens sprawl in marble steps, elegant fountains, trimmed almost-maze-like hedges, and curly flower designs.

The Belvedere has all kinds of art, including the famous painting of Napoleon riding into battle, but it's most known for its number of Gustav Klimt pieces (including the original "The Kiss").

Nailed it.

And then came one of my favorite moments from our trip: Ryan found Hanny Deutsch's marriage license, which had her home address written in beautiful script: Rudolfsplatz 12, in Vienna's Jewish quarter.

Hanny's home was right around the corner from what is now a Holocaust memorial.

Just down the street from Jewish Plaza (Judensplatz), we found her home at the turn of the century: It looks out over a small square park, and is now a textile firm...which Molly said was unsurprising, given that Hanny worked in the textile business in New York.

We went to see Verdi's Rigoletto at the Wiener Staatsoper, which was only the second Verdi I'd seen! Our favorite part of the experience—besides just seeing such a famous opera house—was the awesome set design, which included a huge rotating structure with various "scenes" built into different sides. The effect, with its dead trees, sharp corners, and colorless décor, was just edgy enough for the opera itself.