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Published: April 18th 2012
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Imperial Palace
Marathon finish line the day after! I got up early today, at 6:00am. We were still debating if we want to go to Munich, Salzburg or stay another day in Vienna. I did not want to end the trip so early. But there seemed no other good solution. We had to checkout of the hotel anyway. So we packed up, checked out and then went to Bahnof to put luggage in locker. First stop of the day was
Imperial Palace. We took some photos of the
parliament building and then entered the palace gardens. The gardens were not very impressive at this time, I was expecting lot of flowers, but most of the flowers were roses so they were not in bloom. As we got close to the Palace, we saw some white tents in the gardens. Rahul thought there could be some concert there tonight. Soon we saw that tents look familiar and they had Vienna Marathon on them. hmm, duh! So that was where the finish line for marathon was! We had finished our run in Imperial Palance without realizing! The whole place looked so different now. It was nice to walk through the finish line again and take photos.
The Imperial palace was
alright for its EUR 10.50 entrance ticket. I had recently read about the Elizabeth mystery, so I was very interested in the Sisi museum. Its a sad story if its true. While going through the royal apartments, I could see clear difference between the simplicity (as far as the royals go) of Habsburg and lavishness of Versailles. Though I swear some of the furniture was the same, ordered from same store 😉 The dinning hall with plate settings was kind of nice and of course Sisi's exercise room was strange, could not imagine a princess doing hard work!
After Imperial palace we had a simple pizza lunch. On the way we spotted a really interested cupcake shop. So after lunch I went over to the little cute store and had a really nice cupcake. I really wanted to see Gustav Klimt's paintings. So we went to
Belvedere Museum next. It has really beautiful gardens. The palace was quite nice from inside too. There was one room with some Gustav Klimt's paintings and some other contemporary artists, probably not worth its EUR 11 entrace ticket, of course since we are not interested in much of art. But it was good
to spend few hours inside the warm palace instead of out in cold.
After the museum, we decided to checkout some shows to spend rest of the evening. Our option was a musical Sister Act or just hang around in cold, wet outside or go and sit at Bahnof. We loved opera, so I decided to go and check what they have. And vola! they had a Ballet. That's just great, I always wanted to see a ballet. Since this was last minutes, we decided to take just the
standing ticket, costing just EUR 4 a piece, what a steal. There is a whole process of how to use the standing tickets. You line up outside the window that opens 80min before the show. The front standing tickets are kind of nice, right in front of the stage, behind sitting rows. After you buy the tickets, you go queue up in front of the entrance. Tickets are sold only 1 per person and you have to stand in queue to secure your place, no reserving place for others. Doors open 60min before, everyone enters and gets a stnading place in order. There are lot of ushers, making sure everyone
is behaving 😊. Once the standing room is packed full, you get to mark your place with a ribbon/scarf or whatever. Then you get to go out, you are suppose to check in all bags and coats as there is no room for them in standing area. Of course coatcheck is free. So yeah, being there early pays off. We were a bit behind and had a tall guy stand in front, still managed to get really good view of the show. I was quite happy to watch the second show at opera house.
The opera got over at 21:15, and our train was at 22:20. So we headed straight to Bahnof, picked up our bags from locker and boarded the train back to Zurich.
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