Over the course of our trip, we've gotten into a sort of rhythm for how we explore and get to know a new place. By this point, we were on our seventh stop, and making our way to a tourist information desk in each new place would have been both exhausting and pointless. (We were aiming for the least "touristy" experience in each place, besides crossing the major sights off our list.)
So we've figured out that the fastest, most informative, and most enjoyable way to start our time in a new city has been to download Rick Steves's relevant audio walking tour (or, where impossible, open his iBook on our iPads) and follow along. Either format comes with a PDF of recommended walks around certain "themes"--the old city, a particular quarter or market area, a nature walk, an historic overview of a city's past. Besides just getting a lay of the land, we'd be able to bookmark sights and attractions we're interested in tackling later, and often Rick will throw in a few side notes about language, culinary, culture, or navigation tips that we couldn't have easily gotten elsewhere.
So we started our day in Vienna at the Wiener Staatsoper, the state opera house, which is absolutely beautiful both inside and out. It was a convenient first stop on our tour anyway, because we had to pick up tickets for the following night's opera (thanks to Carole). Across the street from the Staatsoper was none other than the original Hotel Sacher with its own Sacher Café, the same local chain we'd visited for tortes on the river in Salzburg the previous day. But in Vienna, the tortes were in such high demand--particularly among tourists--that the line wound out the door and snaked its way down the sidewalk.
We saw Albertinaplatz, which once housed a cellar used during WWII as a bomb shelter. Hundreds were buried alive after a bomb directly hit the area, so the square is now a dedicated monument against war and fascism. We strolled down Kärntnerstrasse, one of Vienna's (many) shopping streets, which led us to 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. (Ryan said the street performances alone were hurting his ears, but they sounded fine to me.)
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 took another main shopping street, Graben, which used to be a moat for the Roman military camp. Between the modern-day stores (from Starbucks to Sephora, and including the prettiest H&M I've ever seen) is a small side street called Dorotheergasse, which is known as the street for appetites; it's lined with inexpensive and well-known Viennese restaurants and cafés. We ate in one such restaurant for lunch: Reinthaler Beisl was crooked room after crooked room with plush chairs pulled up under stark wooden tables, peeling wallpaper, and massive beer steins. We ordered stereotypical Viennese meals (read: beef stew, dumplings, shredded pancakes), and I was so excited to see a heaping side of sauerkraut (because Salzburg taught me that I actually love warm sauerkraut) that I took a massive forkful out of the pile and shoved it in my mouth before Ryan had time to stop me. It was raw horseradish. I cried. On the positive side, I'd had stuffy sinuses all morning, which remained blissfully clear the rest of the day.
Back along the Graben, we saw a beautiful marble and gold statue of the Holy Trinity, with Leopold I (in all his underbite glory) begging on his knees to the Holy Spirit. When the plague killed more than a third of the city in 1679, Leopold purportedly fell to his knees and begged for it to end; and when it did, he resurrected the Holy Trinity Plague Column in commemoration for the lives lost, and as protection against future epidemics.
We then turned into Kohlmarkt, which Ryan joked was the least Kohl's-like street imaginable: It was lined exclusively with the most elegant designers, some I'd never even heard of and most I couldn't pronounce. It was almost comical watching local citizens avoid this street while they hurried along, which meant that everyone else was as much a tourist as we were.
We ended in the Michaelerplatz, where the Hofburg Imperial Palace (i.e., of the Hapsburgs) sits. It's actually a complex of palaces, each grander than the last, now used almost exclusively as museums and parking lots for hundreds of horse-drawn carriages. (There's a Viennese term for these carriages, which are the Vespas of Rome--and taking one will cost you more than even a gondola ride. We heard from one local that they charge about $50 for a 15-minute ride.)
We stopped into the imperial museums, first touring the museum dedicated to Empress Sisi (a highly loved queen of Austria and Hungary, who was assassinated by an anarchist and who infamously despised royal life). We then went through the imperial apartment museum, which was more fascinating for Ryan than it was for me (I was pretty disgusted, actually): It showcased the Hapsburg's thousands--and this isn't an exaggeration, I really mean thousands--of cutlery and tableware pieces. Hundreds of forks--silver, ivory, bone, wood, gold, bronze, porcelain--spoons, types of knives I've never even seen; plates, bowls, sugar bowls, half-plate-bowls; serving wares, candlesticks; cups, teapots, glasses; crystal, diamond, ruby, lapis lazuli...it didn't end. My own version of hell would be the task of polishing all that silver, let alone clean the rest of the collection. Ryan, with his love of Downton Abbey, was more interested in the crazy tree of servants--who reported to whom, who was in charge of the créme brûlée, who extinguished the candles, who wasn't allowed to speak to whom.
We then toured the Kunsthistorisches museum, also on the Hofburg complex but now dedicated to history ranging from ancient Egypt to eighteenth-century Italian painters. By that point, 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 the building, right in the shade of a massive, tear-shaped shrub. Maybe an hour later, we slowly headed back through the city to a restaurant owned by a family that fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution (read: massacre). This restaurant, Ilona Stüberl, taught us that we love--love--Hungarian cuisine.
We ended our night at what ended up being one of our favorite places in Vienna: Das Loft, a loft bar on the 18th floor of the Sofitel near our own hotel. It offered almost 360º panoramic views of the city, and we were lucky to sit right by a soaring window that looked out at a small amusement park and, more interestingly, a large park with two industrial-looking towers. It turns out that these towers were built in WWII to shoot down incoming Ally planes. Although they were never used, they were built to be completely indestructible...which the city verified was true, given how hard they worked to bring them down. They couldn't, so the towers still stand--now as a converted monument against war and violence.
But more about that when we get to Hungary.
