Vienna

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Our train trip to Vienna took us through the Czech countryside and another set of passport stamps before we arrived at a more German looking railway station in Vienna.

Strangely Vienna seems has main stations, on different sides of the city, and our accommodation was near a different station to the one we arrived at. This meant we needed to go for a short ride on a tram. Interestingly, like we experienced in Belgium, this tram spent some time going underground through the central city area.

The next morning we first collected our Grand Prix tickets for Monza (the people we ordered them from were based in Vienna) then we took the advice of the Lonely Planet and took the #1 tram which goes in a ring around the main town centre. (Kind of like our City Circle except that this one is not free.) An interesting thing about this tram route was that it featured trams running in the kerbside lanes, the first time we had seen this. This means that you do not need to cross any traffic lanes in order to catch a tram.

Vienna has many impressive buildings that you can see from this tram route including the usual suspects: catherdrals, a town hall, the parliament building and some museums. In fact there are very many museums in Vienna although we had no intention of visiting very many of them. After doing our lap of the city we decided to get out and walk the best bit of it. After taking photos of statues of various classical music composers that we had heard of (Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms etc) we went to an old church building where outside was a man who appeared to be dressed up as Mozart. He approached us to try and sell us tickets to a concert that was being held that night. After initial hesitation we decided to accept and so we would be off for the night to hear the Vienna Mozart Orchestra. Later on we found that there were heaps of people dressed up in period costume trying to sell tickets to various concerts. It must be the thing in Vienna.

Before we went to the concert, we decided to visit one of the museums, the Natural HIstory museum which is housed in a magnificent old building with high ceilings incorporating sculptures and paintings and houses an extensive collection of minerals, fossils, skeletons, and various animals.

The concert itself was enjoyable, we knew about 4 of the 12 or so Mozart pieces, none of which went for too long. The ones we didnt know tended to be operatic numbers and neither of us are a particularly big fan of those. Later we took the metro back to the town hall where they had erected a big screen with seating in front of it and they showed a film of an opera performance. It was a pretty good atmosphere there with lots of cafes and places selling drinks behind the seating.

Vienna in general seemed to be very similar to the German cities we went to, with signs written in the same language (German) and also consisting of the U-Bahn and S-Bahn naming of their metro system. Like the Scandinavian cities, Vienna also has 24 hour tickets which keep a ticket valid for 24 hours after it is first validated. Germany is more like Melbourne with the ticket only valid for the remainder of the day it was first validated on.

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