Vienna Day 2

After a good night's sleep Kaia and I began a rather frantic day of sightseeing on Friday morning. We had a hearty breakfast at our Pension and set out to see a number of different sights within the Ring.


We oriented ourselves to the city with the Rick Steves walking tour which brought us to the Vienna Opera House as our starting point. We decided to see what the daily tour schedule looked like and lo and behold we were able to get into the 10 AM tour which began shortly after we arrived. We ended up taking the fifty minute tour which included some sneak peaks of the backstage area and other interesting parts of the building.




After the tour we continued on to see of the other great sights within the Ring. We went to Albertinaplatz, walked north along Kartnerstrasse toward the cathedral, climbed the 343 steps of the south tower for some great views of the city, walked down the Graben and began to head to the Hofburg Palace. Along the way we went to Buffet Trzesniewski (Gesundheit!) for finger sandwiches that only cost 1 Euro each.


Following our lunch we visited the Hofburg Palace, home of the Habsburg rulers of the Austrian empire. We toured the Royal Apartments and also the palace proper where we saw lots of dishes, place settings, and cutlery, a museum to Empress Sisi, and recreations of the apartments from the era of Kaiser Franz Joseph. It was mind boggling and also a bit dull in places (especially when we were viewing the fifth set of silver plates from the early 1800s) but impressive nonetheless.

Once we finished our tour of the apartments we recovered with some apple strudel and coffee at Cafe Mozart and then visited the Haus der Musik. This was one of the surprising highlights of the trip. It's an unassuming museum tucked away off of Kartnerstrasse with four floors of musical exhibits. One floor is about the history of the Vienna Philharmonic, another floor is about the great musicians who lived in Vienna, another floor is about the science of musical sound. We spent a couple of hours there and I even had a chance to conduct the virtual Vienna Philharmonic. I can put that on my resume I guess.


To conclude our thirteen hours of sightseeing we had dinner at Cantinetta La Norma, a little Italian restaurant Nobu recommended to us near the Haus der Musik, and then we strolled down Kartnerstrasse back to our hotel.