Grandeur and horseplay

Day 2 in Vienna and, once again, grey skies and drizzle. It reminds us a lot of our time in London, which was also grey skies and drizzle. Despite the weather, there is no doubting Vienna is a truly lovely city, perhaps one of the loveliest we've seen. The buildings can only be described as grandiose and imperial, and put anything we have back home to shame. I guess you can afford to do that when you are the centre of an empire that ruled over much of Europe for a few centuries. The Habsburgs weren’t afraid of spending a few quid on decent renovations, that’s for sure.

The entrance to Vienna Target (lol). Just joking, this is the Imperial Palace, Hofburg

That's me at the back of the palace

We’ve been making good use of the excellent public transport here, the trams in particular. Actually, Vienna does tend to remind us somewhat of Melbourne. The grey granite buildings, the city’s trams, the crappy weather, yep, very Melbourne. What it doesn’t remind us at all of is Athens. The streets are clean, there are functioning traffic lights and drivers actually obey them, there are very few motorbikes, and everything actually works. One thing which is hard not to notice is the cars they drive here; every second car is either a Benz, a Beamer, an Audi or a Porsche. I presume these luxury cars, out of the reach of most Australians, are relatively inexpensive here, either that or their salaries must be pretty damn good.

We’ve been quite surprised that there is virtually no written English in the entire city. Although many people seem to speak at least some, and quite a few have excellent command of English, when it comes to written English to cater for tourists you can just about forget it. We were at a museum today walking through the Egyptology section and had to leave as all of the information was in Austrian/German only. This is the same on train stations, supermarkets, etc. It’s made things a little tricky for us on occasions but we are managing.

This morning we visited the Spanish Riding School. This world famous attraction dates back four hundred and fifty years. There are 106 very lovely horses in various stages of training at the moment, but only a much smaller number are trained well enough to actually perform. All of the horses undergo training for up to eight years before they know all of the moves, and today we got to see around twenty undergo their training. They are the most beautiful animals and we really enjoyed seeing each horse’s personality shine through in the way they went about their practice. The building in which they train is itself absolutely magnificent, having been purpose built by the Kaiser many centuries ago.

Inside the Spanish Riding School (file footage)

We also visited the KHM gallery (it has a much longer name, of course, but I could never spell it, much less pronounce it). It is one of the world’s great museums/galleries and has collections from all the modern masters, such as Raphael, Reubens, Caravaggio, etc. The collection is absolutely stunning, but equally stunning is the building itself. Built by Franz Josef (he was the guy who led the Austro-Hungarian Empire into World War One) to display the considerable collections of generations of Habsburg rulers, it was worth the thirty euro admission just to marvel at the architecture alone.

Inside the KHM gallery - beautiful, isn't it

We were planning on doing another trip into the old part of Vienna this evening, to sample some more lovely ice cream or maybe some magnificent Viennese cakes, but the rain is now pretty consistent, so we may have to give it a miss. Last night we took a train into the city and walked to the famous Danube. The Danube is to Vienna as the Yarra is to Melbourne, although maybe a little more illustrious. It snakes its way through the city, carrying tourists on very large barges (at very large prices).

The Vienna Bibliotech - don't let the blue sky fool you, this is more file footage 

There are more fountains here than any place else we've seen with the exception of Rome. They just love their fountains

Speaking of prices, Vienna is certainly not the cheapest city to visit. I’m afraid free entry to attractions is something the Viennese are not familiar with. By contrast, a tourist coming to Melbourne or Sydney could visit our national galleries and museums, and many of our finest public buildings, for free. Not so here; almost everything attracts an entry fee, and they are not cheap at that, the average being around 15 to 20 Euro (that’s around $23 to $30 AUD). However, despite what we had read and heard before coming here, the price of food is quite reasonable. We had croissant and pastries this morning for breakfast (yes, I know, but toast is so, well, boring) and they came to well under two euro for the lot. I think one freshly made croissant in Australia would set you back this much alone.