Day 5 (July 6th): Vienna in Honeymoon

I knew that the one day our cruise line gives us in Vienna isn't going to be enough, but after seeing around for a day, I think it'll take several days to do all the things I would want to do here.

This day was long. We woke up early at 7am for breakfast and then took a bus tour and walking tour that ended up in Alt Wien at around 10:30, where we got an hour (only!) to wander around and buy souvenirs. I want to get into the museums, the opera house, the philharmonic, and spend maybe a day there, but seeing it was a Sunday and nothing was open, and that we only had an hour, instead we went to a coffee house to get coffee and sachertorte. It was yummy, and service was slow, so we were forced to slow down and relax. The coffee house has a plague in front that essentially said it was where Beethoven and Haydn visited when they wrote their music, and that this is a place where you can find "smart conversation". I took a picture of it and had google do character-recognition and translate it; the translation was very bad. I had to switch to word-by-word to get the gist of it.

We spent maybe half an hour at the cafe (luckily it was very empty, it being a Sunday, so service was faster than normal), we went to one of the tourist traps to get our souvenirs... Both La Professeure and I stocked up on Mozart Kugel. We then bussed back to the ship for lunch.

The docks were quite a ways from the city center, so every time travel between the city center to the ship we lose a half-hour. After lunch we went out to the Schonbrunn palace. It was a sight - the rooms were gorgeous, but also very crowded and not ventilated well, so it was a relief to come out of the building when the tour ended. We spent the next hour exploring the garden and marvelling at the amount of work that it must have taken to maintain it. We went up to the fountain but not the pavillion, and had a lot of fun. However, it was exhausting because the grounds was so vast. It was 4:30 when we were done.

By the time we got back to the ship and had dinner, it was time to go out again for a Mozart/Strauss concert. I usually hear the term "Mozart Strauss" in the context of opera singer types, so I was expecting Richard Strauss music, but then, since this is a Vienesse concert geared towards tourists, it stood to reason they were referring to Johann Strauss Jr. The concert was performed by a chamber orchestra called the Vienna Resident orchestra; it is only an 8-piece orchestra, 3 woodwinds and five strings, including the concert master, with a piano to fill in the missing notes. They were good musicians, and I could hear individual parts a lot more clearly. The program was divided into the Mozart half and the Strauss half. I liked the Mozart portion much more than the Strauss. They did the Cosi overture, the first movement (without repeat) of the Turkish violin concerto, had a soprano sing Queen of the Night's Rage aria (the coloratura was awesome), had her and a baritone sing La ci darem la mano, and played the Turkish March with a couple of ballet dancers performing. I don't quite remember what they did for Strauss part, but I think there were some polkas and some waltzes. By that part I was already starting to doze of from having such a long day. It was 10 by the time we came back to the boat, and we also sampled goulash that the chef had made. It was nothing too terrific, though, tasty, but not extraodinary.

La Professeure said it is going to take at least a week to explore the whole city; I think the museums, the concert halls and opera house, and the parks will be well worth coming back for.