Drag Queens in Texas

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The Argentian born Sicilian sitting next to me just said something about that, so I thought that'd be a fun title for today.

So I left off in Prague. The 2nd, we went to Prague Castle and wandered around, despite that fact that it was absolutely freezing. The first thing we saw was the Lobowitz musuem which is a musuem about the Lobowitz family. They were a family of princes in Prague for about 6 centuries and incredibly rich and powerful. Their musuem was interesting, just because they had Beethoven's original manuscripts for his 4th and 5th symphonies because one of the princes was Beethoven's patron. Other than that, it was basically just a family history musuem. The rest of the Prague Castle was an effort of the Czech to prove how old Prague is. We went to St. Vitus's Cathedral, where St. Wenseclas is buried, the Old Royal Palace, which seemed very wooden and decripit, the history of the palaca museum, which had more artifacts that it could handle spacially, St. George's Basilica, where St. Ludmila is buried, and the Golden Lane, which is an old street where the market used to be. Prague Castle is huge and beautiful, and from what I can tell, best visitied in summer, because no where we went besides the Lobowitz musuem in the entire complex was heated. After the Castle, we booked it down to the Mucha musuem, which is AMAZING. Less the musuem, which is pretty standard, but I'm now a huge Mucha fan. The musuem was interesting, and his paintings and drawings are just beautiful. There's definitely going to be some buying of posters when I get back.

The next day we made our way slowly to the train station and got on a train to Vienna. Vienna was colder than Prague when we got there, but thankfully we had booked a hostel. Our hostel was pretty cool and we spent the evening playing cards with two French Canadians in the bar. The next day we wandered around Vienna and took the Ring Line tram to get a good view of Vienna and then went over to the Museum-Quartiers. There are a bunch of musuems in a very small density, and we ended up just buying a pass for the Leopold Museum and the MOMUK. The Leopold Museum was just for Austrian artists and had huge displays of Schiele and Klimt, one of which I liked and one of which I didn't. you guys get to guess which is which. The MOMUK was modern art, and had a huge exhibit on China, which I found extremely wierd, but as we didn't really spend that much time there, I was ok with it.

The next day we went to the Hofburg Palace in the center of Vienna. It's huge. Like massive huge. I think these people knew they were rulers of an MASSIVE empire and wanted to show it. We weren't allowed into a lot of it, but we got to see the Silver Collection (think plates, Mom), a museum devoted to the last empresses very strange life, and then the royal apartments which are huge and beautiful. In general, I liked it, but I may have been palaced out by living in St. Petersburg. After that we tried to go to the Opera House and get standing room only tickets (which they sell for 3 euro). When we asked a guy for info about it, he looked at us and laughed because apprently there had been a line since 6 in the morning, but how were we supposed to know? Immediately after, we crossed the street and went to the Albertina to see if we had enough time before it closed to see the musuem, and the woman at the ticket desk there laughed at us too. I was more expecting the se4cond, but still, being laughed at by two Austrians in the space of twenty minutes takes special skills.

The next morning we woke up at ate breakfast with two Americans who were working in Japan but were in Vienna on vacation. We swapped stories of ridiculousness and the inability to teach foreigners English. Kira and I then stopped by the post office, bought 21 stamps and made our way to the train station and Bratislava.

I'll have to finish later because there are a ton of other people waiting for the computers, and I've taken forever.

From Europe With Love

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