Visiting Vienna
A couple weeks ago the program took us to Vienna, which was really neat. Vienna is a very active, interesting place with a lot of history, and I appreciated the chance to visit it.We saw two operas: "Werther", an opera in French by Massenet, based on Goethe´s novel, and Johann Strauss´s comedy "Die Fledermaus." There was also a really cool event going on during one of our few days there: "the long night of the museums," in which all of the great museums in the city are open until 1am. I spent most of the night at the Art History museum, which has a lot of original masterpieces, such as Bruegel´s "Tower of Babel" that I included below. On other days, some of the other places we
visited included the Natural Science Museum, the Schönbrunn Palace, and the history of Vienna museum. The history museum was particularly interesting, and John, Ashish and I stayed for almost half a day. There were these enormous paintings of the 2nd seige of Vienna by the Ottomans in 1683. The Ottomans almost captured the city, but a Polish army arrived in the nick of time to rescue the Austrians.The city of Vienna is interesting, because it´s a modern city of 1.6 million where people still live, but it´s like the whole city is a monument to an Empire that no longer exists. Vienna´s days of glory are long over. Today, the city´s population is still significantly smaller than it was a century ago, when the Austrian-Hungarian Empire was at it´s peak.
I´m glad I saw Vienna. Würzburg is still an unhappy place for me. This week I´m trying something new: I´m ditching the laptop and internet access i have in my room, as well as my TV. Tomorrow I will go to the library and check out a bajillion books. Maybe, if I don´t have anything else to do, and my room is covered in books, I will read them. Maybe something good will happen here this week. Otherwise... i don´t even know.See below for more pictures from Vienna.
posted by Henry van Wagenberg at 9:19 PM
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Schönbrunn Palace.
