Vienna - Sisi - and more art

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The second day in Vienna, we went to the Royal Apartments and the Sisi Museum. Sisi was the Empress Elizabeth—a gorgeously beautiful girl who married the Crown Prince of the Austro Hungarian empire at aged 15 just at the end of the 19th century—and how she was oppressed by this, was obviously bulimic, then depressed, was fixated on keeping her beauty, had her children alienated from her, travelled incessantly and restlessly, and finally was assassinated—so many of the same issues as Diana. When she died she was idolised and many films have been made about her glamour and beauty, but it was life submerged in tragedy.
We thought Vienna would be full of music, especially Strauss, but there has been nothing really, and we managed to unearth the Strauss museum. It was hard to find, was entered through a urine smelling dirty foyer and was very boring—it was really disappointing. We did find out that Johan Strauss the elder was very dashing and handsome with flyaway hair and an enormous moustache...
We finally ended up at the Kunsthistoriches Museum—it is the Art gallery—a great collection of many famous European painters and it was wonderful to see real paintings by these amazing artists—and some less known too. They had many there by Arcimboldo who was the court painter for a long time—he’s the artist who made faces out of objects such as vegetables—very very clever and seemingly very modern although he worked in the 1500’s.
Ken working on the computer—1000 km to get the campervan back to Berlin in 2 days—will we do it??—more will be revealed....

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