Vienna

Our second day in Vienna we drove into the downtown area to explore the churches and palaces that make up the center. We found a parking garage and when we walked out we were right in front of the amazing Karlskirche.

Of course the first thing the kids saw was the playground on the other side of the square and begged to go play. We told them we would AFTER we saw the church. We are not above bribery!

The church was built as a memorial basically to commemorate the end of one of the plagues. The columns are carved with scenes from the life of a saint who was known to be a plague healer. It's different from other churches we've seen on the exterior but grand and gold on the inside. 

Inside the church they've erected some scaffolding with an elevator so that you can ride to the top of the dome and look down and see things up close. I'm torn because it's obviously an eyesore but Abby, William, and I went to the top and the view was pretty cool.

Abby wanted a picture of the smile

 Vienna is definitely a working city. On the one hand, it's not as beautiful as others we've been in, but it had an international feel to it. There were tourists around of course but also just everyday people going about their business and you could hear and see that they're from all over. Vienna sits in a corner of Austria that is bordered by Czech, Slovakia, Hungary, and I think Slovenia and you could see and feel the diversity.

We made our way to the center and the beautiful St. Stephensdom - the roof was my favorite part!!

Across from it was this really modern structure!  

Chopper calls this one the ninja nun.

We decided to take the catacombs tour and it was fantastic!  It also freaked Megan and Abby out though. The first part has been redone so it's plastered and white and bright and holds the coffins of some of the Hapsburgs as well as an entire room of copper urns. The Hapsburgs wanted to be embalmed and so they would have their internal organs removed and their cavities filled with wax. The organs were placed in copper urns with alcohol to preserve them but the alcohol and the copper reacts with each other and over time holes develop and the urns leak. Our guide told us that one was so bad about 5 years ago that they had to close the cathedral for about 3 weeks due to the smell.  Marie Therese started leaking a few weeks ago but they caught it before it got too bad. I don't know why they don't put them in tupperware or something!!

After that part we walked through several sections that were exposed brick and piles of bones. This was the part that freaked the kids because the lighting was (purposely??) not great and the bones were real. The smell of a graveyard had gotten so bad that they banned people from being buried in the churchyard and moved the cemetery out of town. But people still wanted to be buried by the church and so they decided to build catacombs underneath. They also came in very handy when plague struck and they had to bury large masses of people quickly. They would wall up the rooms when they were full but had opened windows in some of the doors so you could see the bones. Megan and Abby were not happy about the tour at this point but William wanted to be lifted up to see all the bones.  He thought it was creepy and cool.

We had to get ice cream to soothe our creeped out souls and then we wandered off in search of an English language bookstore I had read about online and we found it!!  It was such a joy to browse among books we could actually read!

Cramped and stuffed, Shakespeare and Co. was fabulous and we let the kids each choose a book because we don't often get the chance to do that.

Vienna is the home of Mozart and actually we missed seeing his house of birth or really any of the famous sites associated with him. We probably should have done more but we only had so much time!

Our wanderings usually include looking for a bathroom and we stumbled on a great plague column and this view during one of our searches.

Turns out it was the Hofburg palace complex!  It was almost the end of the day by this point so we did two things - we went inside the church next door and then into the treasury - Chopper loves a good treasury!

Everyone liked this bookcase stairway to heaven - appropriately made out of Bibles.

It also had a memorial to those killed at Dachau.

Back to the Hofburg palace and a quick run through the treasury before it closed.

Crown jewels are Chopper's favorite.

Sometimes the wearers of those jewels aren't so awesome though. 

But I loved this one!

This crown was from the Holy Roman Empire

And a sword case made from a narwhal horn!

And I know you can't really see Megan but this embroidered whatever it is was fantastic and I wanted her in the picture for the scale.  It was intricate and amazing up close though.

The kids liked this one too - the oo house

We stopped for dinner at an Italian restaurant where the owner didn't really speak English or German. We figured it out though and decided that the Italian word for eggplant is a lot prettier than the English one!

Back to the church and it was too gorgeous not to take another picture, especially with the clouds starting to reflect the sunset.

We liked Vienna a lot.  We didn't necessarily love it. Every time we go on a trip we talk afterwards about whether or not we want to go back or go somewhere new. We try to get in so many new places but there are those that we love so much we want to go back - England and Prague especially. So Vienna was great and we know we missed a lot but I don't think we'll be back.