Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Vienna: One Big Museum

When you're a person who loves to explore, you feel the complusive need to force your companions to see every sight there is when traveling. I usually spend time pouring through TripAdvisor and city tour sights before departing to get a feel for what I "must see and do". I love studying maps and routing potential sight itineraries for each day.

In the afternoon following the release of the academics from their finance conference, I met up with my husband and a few friends from the university to drag them around Vienna. I navigated us through the metro to St. Stephen's Cathedral, and from there, took us along the main tourist route to the Hofburg Imperial Palace. I had made this same route before during my previous visit to Vienna some three years earlier. It's amazing how one time in a city and you will still recognize your way around the next time you visit.

In front of the Hofburg Palace, we stopped to have a coffee because I said that was a Viennese thing to do (and also the professors needed a pick-me-up).

We continued our jouney past the Palace, the Sissy Museum, the famed Spanish Riding School, and the National Library to the Maria-Theresien-Platz. The Maria-Theresien-Platz is flanked on either side by two almost identical looking buildings, The Museum of National History and the Fine Arts Museum.

Walking south from the Maria-Theresien-Platz, you'll cross the Museumplatz to discover.... even more museums! Museumquartier is a cool grouping of various museums, along with bars, restaurants, and open outdoor space for nights out. We saw a Tiki foodcart selling mojitos, which we figured we needed.

To end our tour of Vienna sights, we headed to the Rathaus (Town Hall). Exactly the same as my trip before, they were playing outdoor movies on a screen placed over the Town Hall building. There were plenty of people about, enjoying the movie showings the city puts on each summer.

When we got back to our hotel, I felt quite accomplished by what we had covered. It would really have been a shame for these colleagues to have missed all these sights!

St. Stephen's Cathedral


Cool street art
Hofburg Palace
Making the museum route, outside the National Library.
The Natural History Museum... or the Museum of Fine Arts. They look so similar! 
Professors on the town.
Summer Movie Festival!

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