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City Lights.3

A colonnade along one side of the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna City Opera) building during an evening walk. Apparently no performance that evening because we walked all the way around it and the only line of people we found was folks queueing up for an underground dance club. For either environmental or budgetary reasons (or both), the façade was not dramatically lit, and we didn’t get back during daylight hours, so no photos of the rest of the building from this trip, sadly…

Urban Garden.123

A final image from Vienna’s lovely Stadtpark (City Park), which I failed to wrap into my last post from said park :-).
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Urban Entrances.52

Small Wonders.152

We’ve reached the point here in the fairly-far-northern hemisphere where the sun rises disappointingly late and sets disappointingly early, I find myself counting the weeks and days until the earth starts to rotate the other way and begin shortening the southern days and lengthening our norhtern days…and if on a work-from-home day the sun peeks out from behind the clouds after my last onscreen work appointment, I automatically think “get out of the house for a walk and enjoy it while it’s shining!” The above came from one such recent walk along one of my favorite local canals.

City Views.152

Herewith the remaining imitation-Greco-Roman art & architecture I observed (and took time to photograph – honestly, there was a great deal more than just this, but even I can’t take a new photograph every second step) during my long weekend in Vienna. Above: no, it’s actually not the Parthenon in Athens but instead the Austrian Parliament Building. Despite my initial guess that this was built in the aftermath of WWI, it was actually built in the late 1800’s, so while Vienna was still a capital of the Habsburg Empire but when they’d decided to create houses of lords and representatives. The Pallas Athena statue certainly seems to convey a message about the strength of a democracy…a message many of us hope remains true. 🙂 Below, an 1820’s “replica of the Temple of Theseus in Athens,” now a popular spot for wedding photos. (The original, wiki tells us, was really a temple to Hephaestus but featured statues of Theseus, so folks got confused over the millennia.) The fancy building behind the wannabe Theseus Temple is Vienna’s City Hall.

City Views.151

All my remaining photos of the grounds and building of Schönbrunn Palace. Just above, the west wing of the palace as seen from the west gardens, and above that, a greenhouse we didn’t enter, on the west side of the grounds. Immediately below, two photos I snuck while touring the rooms inside that wing and the rest of the palace: the photo out the window is looking out towards the Gloriette, built at the highest point in the park and from which (or of which) came most of the photos in the larger gallery further below. Just below the two circular indoor photos is one of my total favorite elements: a fake Roman Ruin! Yes, the Habsurgs must have suffered from imposter syndrome because they seem at some point in the 18th century or so to have decided it would enhance their prestige to have a “Roman Ruin” on the grounds of their summer palace. Umm, ok…. :-).

 

Small Wonders.151

We were at the Hofburg on a rather wet, cold and drizzly afternoon, so the idea of the butterfly house appealed. Not big enough and too crowded to be really worth the price of admission, IMHO, but still lovely to see these butterflies.
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Urban Entrances.51

Urban Garden.121

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 :-).

Urban Canals.111

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.

Urban Canals.110

Urban Garden.120

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.