Vienna / Wien

We spent the weekend in Vienna, a post-Thanksgiving trip with the students. Vienna is an easy three hour train trip from Salzburg and now is a good time to visit because the city is in full pre-Christmas swing with Christmas markets and lights everywhere. Vienna is a big city, just like New York or Chicago except that its history dates back to Celtic times, it was the Imperial Capital of the Habsburg Empire for a couple hundred years, it had its great renaissance in the 1600s, during which time many, many buildings still in use today were constructed, and it was occupied by Napoleon for a while. Okay, so I guess Vienna isn't anything like New York or Chicago at all, except that it's big. Because it is so big, visiting Vienna is different than other places we've been because you really have to have a plan in place. It's hard to just wander because distances are so much greater and just about everything is grand, though don't get me wrong - wandering in Vienna is just fine too.

Our plan was to make Vienna as kid friendly as possible, and so we skipped the palaces and galleries and serious museums. Instead, we made two trips in the dark to the big Christmas Market on Rathausplatz, which is incredibly large with 140 stalls that you can visit online if you can't get there yourself, as well as some carnival-type rides for kids. We also went to the Haus der Musik, an interesting museum that explores sound and music with many interactive features that makes it fun for kids as well as adults. You even have a chance to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic, and if you're lucky the orchestra on screen will actually play for you instead of berating your conducting skills! We wandered through Naschmarkt, an incredibly immense market that includes upscale restaurants, fruit and vegetable stalls, souvenirs, Asian herbs and spices and trinkets, and eventually spills into a parking lot where people set up their own flea market stalls with all kinds of junk. A final outing took us to Zoom Kindermuseum, which is such a popular children's museum that you have to book a playtime in one of the exhibitions.

I find that the larger the city, the fewer pictures I take. Perhaps it is because everything is on such a big scale, or perhaps because in a place like Vienna, everything is worthy of taking a photo and so you just take it all in instead of snapping away. At any rate, you can see more photos from Vienna here.