This is Girardi Park (or so says Google Maps), next to the Secession Building, close to St Charles’s Church (two of the reasons we found ourselves in this corner of the city), and across the street from where we had our mandatory mid-afternoon cafe stop, Vienna being a city long loved for its cafe culture, after all :-).
From roughly the same spot along the Amstel, while exploring the city with different friends on different days in late September. A thing I keep meaning to do is sign up for rowing lessons, which I think are offered from this pier; though, if I do it, I’ll likely end up doing it on the Nieuwe Meer a bit closer to where I’m living.
Though not nearly as canal-rich as Amsterdam is, Vienna does have a few canals attached the Danube. Though it’s situated along one of Europe’s most important rivers, for reasons I haven’t explored, the heart of Vienna is actually a few km west of the river itself. (I suspect we’d had more time and visited in the summer with longer days, we might have gotten over the Danube and found it’s popular for outdoor recreation.) This is a side canal on the edge of the City Park, featured in our last post.
These are all from a lovely morning walk in the Wiener Stadtpark (Vienna City Park) before setting out on our longer exploration of the whole Schönbrunn complex. Our hotel was just next to this park, which is smack in the heart of the city. Seeing how many monuments with sculptures of Vienna’s great composers (including Schubert, below), or other artistic flourishes such as the other sculpture below — entitled “freeing the spring” (more or less) and apparently depicting two men working to remove a stone that’s blocking a well or spring — reminded me that quite aside from being for centuries an important center of power in Europe, Vienna was also / has also long been a leading center of culture for centuries. In that “spa” building shown above are frequent waltz events, the waltz being probably the form of music and dancing most closely associated with Vienna.
A (rainy) daytime view of Vienna’s Stephansdom (of you’ve seen the nighttime view in an earlier post), along with a few scenes from the plaza and adjoining streets around it on that particular afternoon.
That’s the actual Schönbrunn Palace at the bottom of the hill — and we will show more of it in future posts, I promise – but since the stroll through the grounds with autumnal foliage everywhere was so lovely, that’s the focus today :-).
I’m certainly happy that we lingered in the gardens first before approaching the actual palace at Schönbrunn. And didn’t this particular leaf times its fall well? 🙂
This is Vienna’s Anker Clock, whose 12 pairs of people are dressed to represent different phases of Viennese cultural history. A different pair parades across each hour, and at noon each day, all 12 parade across in succession – so the guide books say. It was raining so we weren’t able to stay long enough to get the full experience.
(so much world, so little time....) 