Eastern Europe trip: part 4
The next day, we went up to Buda Castle, wandering around the environs first. It was a very clear and hot day (little did I know the rest of the trip would be BLAZING hot when I'd packed for the fifty- and sixty-degree weather that had been forecast) and the views went on forever. 
This is Matthias Church, which I think gets second prize (NOBODY beats Sagrada Família) for the wackiest church I've seen. I think I had a dress with that roof pattern when I was helpless against my mom's fashion-related machinations! And what's up with the one black spire?
That whole area was a treat to walk around in and explore.
(Is that a hand dangling off the skin this guy's wearing? You know, never mind - I don't want to know.) There, in the distance, was Parlament.
(Any fangirls need to make a withdrawal?)
We took a train to Vienna. I don't know if these are poppies, but they looked like it to me:
To my great surprise, nobody seemed particularly interested in Vienna. Maybe it was because we'd been to Berlin as a family a few years ago, maybe it was the unexpectedly hot weather that caught us all unprepared in terms of clothing, maybe it was how much we'd been doing (we walked a minimum of eight miles a day on this trip, every day but the last), but no one was at all jazzed for Vienna. I'd been there about twenty years ago and remembered only a very beautiful hotel facade with gilt and glass mosaics (not where I stayed, I assure you - just a place I walked by and fell in love). Anyway, we were fairly indolent in Vienna and just walked around the city center. Good to see Hercules doing some work:
And here's sort-of hometown-hero Mozart (I particularly liked the little cellist cherub on one side of the monument):
Some heroic monuments (including City Hall - the Rathaus), the roses in the Volksgarten, and some unexpected beauty in what amounts to a strip mall (!):
.
After a highly disappointing trip to get Sacher torte from the Sacher Cafe (everything was abysmal except for my spice cake, which was only pretty bad), we split up, my dad and brother to rest and my mom and I to look at art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum has a few pieces by my favorite artist, Caravaggio (see the icon), so I spent some quality time with those. They've also got famous works by Parmigianino, Veronese, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Titian. The building itself is pretty splendid too. Anyway, I got the two of us back to the hotel without a map or my brother and felt tremendously accomplished. Our hotel happened to be right next to a Russian Orthodox cathedral, which looked amazing when the sun went down:
And we had some misadventures trying to find some dinner but at least we got to stop in and have a drink at a real Austrian beer garden:
.
We decided we'd take a quick train to Bratislava the next morning instead of spending another day in Vienna. We ran for the train and made it by the skin of our teeth. Bratislava was quiet and pretty and honestly, nothing that we weren't getting elsewhere, but it was nice to make a change.
(Though, why was that fountain so porny? And what do shellfish have to do with pharmaceuticals?)
And that was that for Bratislava!
This same entry also appears on Dreamwidth, at http://innie-darling.dreamwidth.org/452428.html.
This is Matthias Church, which I think gets second prize (NOBODY beats Sagrada Família) for the wackiest church I've seen. I think I had a dress with that roof pattern when I was helpless against my mom's fashion-related machinations! And what's up with the one black spire?
That whole area was a treat to walk around in and explore.
(Is that a hand dangling off the skin this guy's wearing? You know, never mind - I don't want to know.) There, in the distance, was Parlament.
(Any fangirls need to make a withdrawal?)
We took a train to Vienna. I don't know if these are poppies, but they looked like it to me:
To my great surprise, nobody seemed particularly interested in Vienna. Maybe it was because we'd been to Berlin as a family a few years ago, maybe it was the unexpectedly hot weather that caught us all unprepared in terms of clothing, maybe it was how much we'd been doing (we walked a minimum of eight miles a day on this trip, every day but the last), but no one was at all jazzed for Vienna. I'd been there about twenty years ago and remembered only a very beautiful hotel facade with gilt and glass mosaics (not where I stayed, I assure you - just a place I walked by and fell in love). Anyway, we were fairly indolent in Vienna and just walked around the city center. Good to see Hercules doing some work:
And here's sort-of hometown-hero Mozart (I particularly liked the little cellist cherub on one side of the monument):
Some heroic monuments (including City Hall - the Rathaus), the roses in the Volksgarten, and some unexpected beauty in what amounts to a strip mall (!):
.
After a highly disappointing trip to get Sacher torte from the Sacher Cafe (everything was abysmal except for my spice cake, which was only pretty bad), we split up, my dad and brother to rest and my mom and I to look at art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum has a few pieces by my favorite artist, Caravaggio (see the icon), so I spent some quality time with those. They've also got famous works by Parmigianino, Veronese, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Titian. The building itself is pretty splendid too. Anyway, I got the two of us back to the hotel without a map or my brother and felt tremendously accomplished. Our hotel happened to be right next to a Russian Orthodox cathedral, which looked amazing when the sun went down:
And we had some misadventures trying to find some dinner but at least we got to stop in and have a drink at a real Austrian beer garden:
.
We decided we'd take a quick train to Bratislava the next morning instead of spending another day in Vienna. We ran for the train and made it by the skin of our teeth. Bratislava was quiet and pretty and honestly, nothing that we weren't getting elsewhere, but it was nice to make a change.
(Though, why was that fountain so porny? And what do shellfish have to do with pharmaceuticals?)
And that was that for Bratislava!
This same entry also appears on Dreamwidth, at http://innie-darling.dreamwidth.org/452428.html.