The Kunsthistorisches Museum

  One of the things we did while bopping around Vienna after Christmas was to go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the city's main museum of fine arts.  It was absolutely wonderful; we spent pretty much a full day in it, and were quite tired and sated by the end!  Minimal commentary here, mostly I'll just show you a bunch of photos I took with Keewi's camera.  (By the way, I make a note of which camera I'm using mostly for my own benefit, because I'm curious to see how our two very different cameras perform under different circumstances; hers is a Canon Digital Elph, a small point-and-shoot, mine is a Panasonic/Leica "SLR-like" type).

  Starting off with ancient (Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, ...) art, of which they have an enormous collection:

  The bust is of Aristotle.  The building itself is amazing too, by the way:

  OK, now onward to somewhat more modern times:

  They have some neat suits of armor, as you can see.  Keewi wanted to be in the photo with the unicorn.  The spherical reflection painting is obviously reminiscent of Escher's famous drawing, but centuries earlier!  In one of the photos you can see a fellow painting a reproduction of one of the paintings on the wall; it was stunningly good, virtually indistinguishable from the original.  I spent a long time glancing back and forth between them, trying to find any difference!

  Out into the atrium for a breather:

  And then we plunge into the other wing:

  This wing didn't do as much for me as the other wing.  Many of the paintings were very dark, in need of restoration I think.  Many were also religious paintings of this saint or that, this biblical event or that, which I find quite boring.

  And that's your museum tour for the day.

Bopping around Vienna

The next couple of days we just walked around Vienna seeing the sights:

  From the top, that's the Rathaus (on an unusually gorgeous day!), Parliament with the Rathaus behind, an enormous Wiener schnitzel at Figlmüller, the Belvedere and gardens, back to the Rathaus for the Christmas market there, Parliament and the Rathaus at night, and some detail on the Parliament.  We did go into the Belvedere itself and looked at art all day, but I didn't carry my camera these days; these are all on Keewi's camera.

  We also we out to dinner at a Korean restaurant with some old friends who some of you may recognize:

  It was a bit of a strange Korean restaurant (no bibimbap on the menu!), but very fun!

Schönbrunn Palace

  The next day, the 26th, we went to a spot I never managed to get to during my summer in Vienna: Schönbrunn Palace.  Like the schloss in Laxenburg that I've been working at, Schönbrunn was a summer palace for the Habsburgs, but Schönbrunn is much fancier.  We started out walking around the gardens surrounding the palace; it was a viciously cold winter day, and I'm sure the gardens are much prettier in summer, but here are a few photos nevertheless:

  The third of those five photos is of a fake Roman ruins they had constructed in the garden, to lend atmosphere.  Nothing like the aristocracy, eh?  Can't imagine why we ever got rid of them.

  The interior of the palace is ornate beyond belief.  I wasn't supposed to be photographing, so these are surreptitious grab shots:

  The cabinet on the left in the next-to-last shot belonged to Marie Antoinette, who was one of the daughters of Maria Theresa.  Mostly the decor was simply over the top, but I have to admit, I wouldn't mind having that inlaid wood floor in my apartment.  :->

  There was a Christmas market outside the palace that had a particularly wide assortment of food; we tried maybe five different things, of varying degrees of yumminess.  I thought Keewi had taken photos of all that, but I can't locate them, so I will just leave you with a picture of Schönbrunn at night, as we stumbled back to the U-Bahn, cold but happy:

Brunch and Ballet

 On Christmas Day we plunged headlong into Vienna.  Here's Keewi at Steffl (the Viennese nickname for Stephansdom), with the Christmas tree there:

  We had a nice brunch at a restaurant called Palmenhaus, in an old converted greenhouse that probably used to be an orangery for the royals or some such (it is right next to the Hofburg palace):

  Really a beautiful place.  Keewi took photos of the food, which was a bit fussy and only pretty good:

  However, the dessert was phenomenal (still Keewi photos):

  That's their house dessert, called Palmentorte if I recall correctly; a bit like tiramisu but cakier.  Absolutely heavenly, one of the yummiest desserts I think I've ever had.  We also got a chocolate mousse sort of thing with maybe gooseberries around it, and a hot drink with coffee, Baileys, Kahlua, etc. in it.  Do I look like I'm having fun?

  So, Palmenhaus summary: skip the food and go straight to dessert.

  A bit of wandering, during which I discovered a statue of one of my heroes:

  Here's Keewi next to the famous statue of Mozart, with her trademarked "it's really really cold and I am barely tolerating you taking this photograph of me" expression:

  Then we walked over to the Vienna opera house (Wiener Staatsoper) to see a ballet, Die Fledermaus (music by Johann Strauss II).  It started off a bit boring, but the second half or so was really wonderful.  I didn't take photos during the performance, of course, but the opera house itself is quite a remarkable building:

  That last is the stage, with a curtain by Cy Twombly that seemed more than a bit out of place in the ornate, baroque surroundings.

  Possibly the best thing about this ballet performance was the little girl in the seat directly in front of us, perhaps five years old, who was clearly obsessed with ballerinas and completely over the moon.  She would lift her arms in the air and dance in her chair, while her parents embarrassedly tried to calm her down.  Wonderful.  Eventually we convinced them that we didn't mind, and they relaxed.  She loved Keewi, and insisted on borrowing her father's camera to photograph her.  When I tried to be in the photos too, the little girl got very grumpy, glaring at me filled with suspicion.

  All in all, a perfect Christmas!

Christmas markets

  My wife Keewi arrived in Vienna just before Christmas, for a two and a half week visit.  The first thing we did, immediately after dropping her suitcase at the apartment, was to charge off to the Christmas markets.  This is a lovely Viennese (or probably generally Austrian, perhaps even broader) tradition, in the days just before Christmas, and in some cases extending to New Year's.  A street or a plaza is filled with stalls selling yummy street food and hot spiced wine ("glühwein"), and then it is filled with people consuming those things.  Some stalls also sells arts and crafts, often Christmas-related but often not.  Here are photos (all on Keewi's camera) from three different Christmas markets, actually; in the downtown area they are so close to each other that they practically connect:

  That's the Spitalgasse market (the best crafts stalls), then Maria-Theresenplatz (big and open), then Museumsquarter (the hip Christmas market).  I bought a pair of knitted wool mittens at the Spitalgasse market that are pretty nifty; they have a fleece liner so they're warm, and the part that covers the fingers and thumb can be flipped off and back and buttoned away so that they become open-fingered gloves.  I've been wearing those a lot.  Keewi got roasted chestnuts, I got a potato and garlic patty that was extremely yummy, and we split some grilled sausages with mustard and sauerkraut.

  A lovely way to start what we eventually decided was our long-delayed honeymoon!

Long live the blog!

  Rumors of this blog's death have been greatly exaggerated.  It's been almost two months since I posted; that just means I have a lot of catching up to do.  :->  I see my last entry ended with a photo of a very yummy aperitif, so perhaps to get things going again, I'll start off in the same vein:

  This is a Polish honey liqueur.  Very smooth and sweet, very honey-flavored.  I had it on a cold winter day, and it warmed me down to my toes.

  This is a neat thing about Europe, all the regional drinks.  However, I can't seem to find a good liquor store in Vienna that stocks these unusual and exotic types of hooch.  If anybody reading this knows a good place, please let me know.