Still on Our Honeymoon... Vienna, Day 7 (Stephansdom, Secession, Riesenrad)

Somehow, between our second and third day in Austria, I managed to pickup a Viennese head cold as souvenir so our final day in the city started with me making a hot cup of tea and popping in a "Krauter Bon-Bon," which was the only thing I could find in the drugstore that even mildly resembled a throat lozenge. If the store I visited was any indication, the Austrians are plagued by far fewer maladies than us Americans, or at least have the good sense to know that 50 brands of cough medicine and two dozen flavors of lozenges is overkill.

But this is beside the point.

The point it that my yin and I began our final day at Stephansdom, the very heart of Vienna's Innerstadt:

Now, it was once said of my grandfather Frank that "you couldn't get him to step foot inside a church in America and couldn't keep him out of one in Europe," and I suppose the very same thing could be said about me. Stephansdom first rose out of the earth in the 12th Century and has been the metaphysical and geographical center of Vienna ever since. Beginning as a Romanesque church, it has been built, rebuilt, destroyed, expanded, and renovated for the past 800 years and still towers over central Vienna as it has for centuries.

Before going inside, however, my yin and I decided to take our breakfast tin the square in front the cathedral. I, of course, enjoyed some mysterious, delicious bread from the bakery near our studio, and my yin boldly tried sheep's milk yogurt, which tasted surprisingly (and disturbingly) like sour cream:

Yum!

One thing I haven't mentioned yet is that Vienna was far and away the cleanest, most modern city we visited on our vacation, seamlessly integrating buildings from the Middle Ages with contemporary designs and architecture. So, for example, directly across the cobblestones from Stephansdom sits this building:

This was one of the most fascinating things about the city – the juxtaposition of old and new, the silent collision between the 21st Century and a thousand years of history. In fact, I felt a curious sense of repression throughout Vienna, almost as if the sparkling U-Bahn stations were trying to keep submerged a vast wellspring of anxiety. One must remember that the citizens of Vienna lined the streets to cheer the arrival of Hitler in 1938. So, although Heldenplatz ("Heroes Square") looks like this today:

Heldenplatz, 2012

You can almost feel the memory of this still lurking just beneath the surface:

Heldenplatz, 1938

Prague and Budapest, of course, were also under German control in the years leading up to World War II,  those cities have obviously made a conscious decision to engage with the recent past by cultivating and nurturing collective memory. This was most obvious by the prominence of vibrant Jewish districts (Josefov and Józsefváros, respectively), but was also apparent on a more subtle level. Perhaps after the decades of Soviet dominance following World War II, these nations are less willing to sweep things under the rug, or perhaps it has something to do with the overall cultural make-up of Slavic and Magyar peoples. Whatever it is, this wasn't the case in Vienna, which seemed perfectly content to fast forward from the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire in 1916 straight to the Allied liberation in 1945.

Anyway, all these things have bubbled up primarily in retrospect. On the day in question I was more concerned with taking it all in:

Looking towards the altar.

Beautiful organ with light from stained glass behind.

Creepiest crucifix of the entire vacation.

After Stephansdom, we walked by a house where Mozart once lived and which has now been turned into a museum. As you can imagine, Wolfgang is quite the industry in Vienna, but the reviews we read of this museum were lackluster so we decided to keep on moving, hopping on a bus and making our way back to the Ringstrasse. The next couple of hours were spent taking in the architecture and resting our feet:

Hofburg Palace

National Library

One of my favorites was the Rathaus, Vienna's awkwardly named city hall. This building was built at the end of the 19th Century in the neo-Gothic style and financed by Vienna's burghers. By this point, the imperial fortunes were waning, and Vienna's rising middle classes chose to build the Rathaus directly across from the Hofburg in a symbolic display of who was truly in control of the city:

Rathaus

After grabbing some lunch, we headed just outside the ring to go to the Secession:

"To each age its art, to art its freedom."

The Secession movement began in 1897 in reaction to Vienna's conservative art establishment and encompassed architecture, painting, sculpture, and philosophy. Gustav Klimt, Kolo Moser, and others were founding members, and Secession remains the world's oldest gallery devoted to contemporary art. The Secession movement is generally understood as a subset of my beloved art nouveau, and you could see this clearly in the buildings design, from the trio of owls perched on the side of the building:

These look to play prominently in our future...

To the engravings over the doorway and the turtles holding up this giant decorative urn:

Inside we saw video, photography, painting, and mixed media displays by a trio of contemporary artists, as well as the buildings only permanent exhibition, Klimt's Beethoven Frieze. We weren't allowed to take photos of this exhibit, but here is an image from the Secession website:

 
What you can't see in the photo above is the platform that had been erected in the center of the gallery, which allowed us to come face to face with the mural stretching around the room. Presumably, this was erected in coordination with the exhibit we saw at the Kunsthistorisches Museum two days before, but this is only an educated guess.

By now it was late afternoon so my yin and I headed back to the studio to rest briefly, then headed out for dinner at a nearby restaurant that supposedly has the best pizza in all of Austria. We weren't disappointed:

(The irony, of course, is that after struggling to find non-smoking restaurants the entire time we were in Vienna, we chose to eat in a place that uses an actual wood-burning oven.)

After dinner, we headed back to Praterstern station where we arrived a scant 60 hours earlier and walked to the park that has amused the Viennese since the 1800s. The impetus for this adventure was Orson Welles' The Third Man, which is set in post-war Vienna and climaxes on the Riesenrad:

We were fortunate enough to be there on a weeknight and shared the ride with four other passengers, an older German-speaking couple and a Spanish-speaking couple about our age. From the top of the ride, one can see all of Vienna as well as the colorful expanse of the park itself:

View from the top of the Riesenrad.

Of course, as beautiful as this was, my yin made it even better: