Vienna (August 20)

We arrived in Vienna this morning with the weather taking a distinctly cooler turn - jackets were the order of the day!

Since we had been to Vienna once before (43 years ago!) we signed up for an "up-close" subway & walking tour of the city.  Everybody else took the regular bus & walking tour, so we had a guide all to ourselves!  His background was art and architecture history, so we got a heavy dose of that.  We started at the Vienna Opera:

Right nearby is the famous cafe that claims (disputed) to be the home of the yummy Sacher Torte.  They are also famous for rude and slow service, so we didn't stop in.  We got our sampling of Sacher Torte on the ship that night.

We then spent a long time wandering through the Hofburg, the magnificent (and seemingly endless) place of the Hapsburg monarchy that ruled Austria (and much of the rest of central Europe) for over 600 years.

  Nearby is one of the many bizarre monuments to plague and death in Vienna.  This one was erected in the late 1600's after a severe outbreak of the Bubonic Plague.   If you go into the crypt of Stephen's you will see many other remains of plague victims, all carefully sorted by anatomy, femurs in one room, skulls in another.

 Finally, we ended up at St Stephens Cathedral in the center of the old city.  It is a huge, and very Gothic and gloomy church with very intricate carvings all over.  Like many great European cathedrals, it's more of a tourist destination than a place of worship, and crowds of tourists wander through it noisily.

That evening we went back into Vienna (the ship was located on one of the branches of the Danube about 2 miles from the city center) to a concert by a string quartet at St Anna's a small church on a side street.  The interior was beautifully decorated in baroque paintings and the acoustics (and performance) wonderful.  Afterwards we wandered up and down the main shopping street scouting for souvenirs.