Europe From My Window

I'd like to start off this post by wishing my younger sister congratulations on her high school graduation!! I'm so proud of her and wish I could be there to help her celebrate and welcome her to the 49er family! Yay Jill!

In other news, the first few nights and days at Vienna were a complete success. We spent the first night in our new city checking out our hostel, settling in, and then wandered a bit to grab some dinner. Across our hostel ran two main streets separated by a large strip of what appeared to be run down and tagged half-walls; yet, what was curious is that I could hear a bunch of people, dishes, and the general hum of a busy hub of people coming from that vicinity. Sure enough, after wandering through a small maze of what seemed like the run down ghetto of Vienna, we stumbled upon a crowded marketplace with rows and rows of restaurants and vendors. After walking past countless aisles of different cuisine, we finally settled on a traditional restaurant that claimed to have the best wiener-schnitzel on earth. 

I was personally a bit wiener-schnitzeled out, so I got mystery German soup that looked like this and was actually pretty good.

Afterward, a friend and I wandered into a little low key shop that sold lots of German books, music, trinkets, and just a whole bunch of generally cool but slightly useless things. It was thus a very good store to wander into.

They had a lot of these little postcards with famous monuments on them that you could cut out and put together to form a little model like the ferris wheel pictured above. The ferris wheel itself is one of the most famous attractions in Vienna, officially called Riesenrad (The Giant Ferris Wheel), but more about that later.

This is one of the many interesting hand-made trinkets I found..I particularly like this stamped quote for obvious reasons.

The next morning, as is usual now for our class group, we kicked off with a tour around the city. My professor invited her old colleague, a Vienna local, to teach us a bit about the historic architectural fabric of the city.

First stop: old apartment buildings that appear nearly as just that, until you notice the pink floral design patterning the front facade of the building on the left. This is significant as the work of Otto Wagner, a famous architect of the late 1800s who helped shaped Vienna as we know it today. Wagner was most influential during a time when a number of artists divided from the Association of Austrian Artists to form the Vienna Secession. These secessionists left in order to pursue a different style of art similar to Art Nouveau, and to begin defining Vienna as something new and apart from its old traditional art and architecture. Wagner joined the secessionists and made this building, called the Majolikahaus, which is fronted with tile and patterned in floral and other organic forms similar to the Art Nouveau style. It was originally disregarded as an eyesore of Vienna, but stands today next to its traditional counterpart that serves as a good example of how divided artists and architects really were at the time. I enlarged the photo so you can start to see some of the floral detail.

We looked out at a river, which only appears in some parts of the city since half of Vienna is actually built on top of it. The river looks so dreadful since it was dammed up to create large public spaces. The big market where we ate dinner at the night before, I found out was called Naschmarkt and it too sits a top the river.

Next we hopped on a train to see one of Wagner's many train stations he designed for the city of Vienna.

This is the one we visited, at Karlsplatz. You can see again the floral patterning, but I personally liked this color palette much more. These little stations were also important to the city of Vienna, since at the time there wasn't really a precedent for this functional building type.

Here are a few close up shots, so you can see the detail that went into designing the Karlsplatz station.

We pass by these flower stands all the time in Europe, there's always a dozen bouquets making their way onto the street!

Next stop: Wagner's Osteu Postspatkasse, or the post office. This isn't it. This is the other post office across the way, which was apparently for a wealthier, higher class group of citizens.

Here is Wagner's bank, the people's bank, which was stripped down to a more simple aesthetic that everyone could understand. It is abstracted and yet another contradiction to the then historical, traditional approach to architecture that was so common.

These small rivets on the building are remains of the construction process, which were then capped with aluminum as ornament and to maintain their honesty about the building. This was definitely a modern mindset to decoration and architecture in general, again proving this building as well as Wagner's significance in Vienna.

The cantilever over the front entrance. Keep in mind this was built in the early 1900s! I can only imagine how high-tech this must have seemed.

Another shot of the 'fancy' post office across the lawn.

Inside the post office!

The gift shop had small soaps modeled after architectural details of the building, believe it or not!

A wall inside the post office attributed to its creator, Otto Wagner.

It was a beautiful day in Vienna, and we passed some equally beautiful buildings as well!

You can just see all the random things we pass..and the smile it brings to Americans at times!

This was an old tiled church we passed, and it was beautiful and unlike any church I had seen in Europe up to that point. The colorful tiles were not there originally, but were placed only after a first set of renovations occurred.

It's certainly interesting to see the modern architecture as well!

And apparently it was just the day for crazy churches in Vienna, because after seeing the hodgepodge tile work on the last church, I surely didn't think some of Europes's oldest churches could surprise me anymore until I walked into this one..

BAM! tie dye! I would never in a million ages guess that this is what the church pictured above would look like on the inside! Of course, it turns out that the psychedelic gimmick was just temporary in celebration of a local festival, but even then! I guess I learned to always wander into free churches, because this was amazing, especially with the stained glass windows.

Later that night, my professors announced that we all had tickets to go to a classical concert. So we all got dressed up in something a little nice and headed down in front of one of my favorite buildings in Vienna, and certainly the most architecturally confusing. It's called Karlskirche (St. Charles Church) and just by looking at it you can tell it's a collage of different styles in itself: from the huge freestanding columns flanking either side, to the large central dome, and the Greek pediment and classical entrance. It's crazy! I don't think there's anything quite like it anywhere else.

The large pool in front of it is stunning, too. You can see how little the people are for a scale comparison in the photo above. At this time of day, there were small bean bags set up along the perimeter where people would sit and chat, relax in front of the beauty of St. Charles Church.

One fancy group right there!

We met in this little square to hand out the tickets and get ready to enter the theater.

My two friends and I took a photo once we took our seats at the balcony!

The building was old and naturally stunning, including the ceiling.

This was essentially our view onto the stage, where the piano was set up for the performer. The organ in the back was giant!

This was about 15 minutes to show time, so you can see it was a full house! The standing room in the pack was completely packed as well.

At the end, the audience clapped for a long while, which eventually lead to multiple encores. I lost count after two or three.

Here is the famous pianist himself! It was very strange--he'd finish a piece, and leave as the audience was clapping. He'd return, bow, and leave again. He'd then come back and play an encore, which is the point at which the audience finally let up! It was all a very strange, formal process.

Afterward, it was late and we were lucky to find anywhere still serving food. My friends and I found this little restaurant tucked away in the nearby park, and it was of course beautiful as well. I was at that point starting to believe that everything in Vienna was just amazing. The place had a great performer as well, and if I can get a video up of it I will.In all, it was a great end to a nice first day!

Hope everyone had a great weekend and I'll be sure to post plenty more frequently now that I have internet again, so look out!