Vienna and out...

I am writing this on the train to Prague.  An hour late and no air conditioning.  Welcome to Travels with Joanne (yet another example).  No free Cappuccino this time either. 

Another full day in Vienna, at least for us. 

We had one goal, the Vienna National Gallery.  We had some time to kill before it opened so we headed to St. Stephen's Cathedral first.  It is beautiful and Gothic and imposing. And free!  

Guess What!!!  There is a crypt tour in St. Stephen's too!!  Poor mom, I keep dragging her underground to look at dead people.  She's a trooper though and came with.  This crypt was much more crypt-y than the Capuchin crypt but it was shorter and much less informative.  Actual bones though so that's a plus.  

No photos allowed unfortunately so here are many photos :)

Here are the intestines of the bodies in the Capuchin crypt. Unlabeled.

A couple of rooms of broken statues from above

Ok, that's it for dead people, at least in Vienna.  

Back to plan A, the National Gallery.  Housed, of course in an absolutely stunning building.  The gallery faces the natural history museum so it makes for a lovely setting for a sit/cool down before plunging into art, art, art!!  

I guess I only took this photo of the gardeners hard at work.

Into the museum.  But first a snack!  Here is the view from our table, the natural history museum. 

Our snack.  We are really taking advantage of the 
pastry culture here. 

The museum! 

And of course, the art. Out of context, no explanations.  The Habsburgs were big collectors.

I loved this piece but apparently, 
I didn't take a decent photo of the whole thing

This is carved ivory!  

The room of heads

We were there for hours.  I was very tired by the end.  I managed to completely miss the Klimt room.  :(

By the time we emerged, it was time to head home.  Dinner was left over schnitzel! 

Next morning (today), we didn't have anything planned.  We had to check out by 11 and on our way to the train station by 1/1:30 so we just decided to walk around and absorb the city for a last couple of hours.  

We popped into St. Augustine's church.  The trifecta of visiting Habsburg body parts.  This was the church where they stored their hearts.  You'll be glad to hear we were not invited to the crypts to see the vessels however.  

St. Augustine's is very unassuming on the outside.  Easy to miss.  It just looks like any entrance in one of those fancy buildings.  But if you notice the little sign, and enter, naturally, it is lovely.

The pews were especially cool.  They had carvings all over them. And the front ones, obviously for the important people, have heads carved in them.  

The organ

 We visited a couple of touristy gift shops, as one is required to do when in a foreign city. 

And then a last lunch where I had to get a couple of other Viennese staples, sausage and streusel. I had wanted to get some street meat but it was raining too hard for lunch al fresco so we stopped in a pub.  

And that was it for Vienna.  We headed to the train station and now we are half way to Prague. Here is a crappy train window picture to give authenticity to my claim.

Vienna continued

 Brace yourself, we have two full days to get through! Update, just one day...

My sister-in-law, Jennifer, suggested that we go to the Lipizzaner Stallions morning practice while we are in Vienna.  Great idea.  Before we got here I didn't even know this is where they are from.  And the practice (with music) is way cheaper than the weekend show, which now that I think of it, we wouldn't have been here for anyway.  No photos allowed of the horses so here are some photos.   

Not only were we at the cheap show, we were in the cheap seats!  Welcome to travel with Joanne!  We were in the top balcony so we were looking down at the horses (all the better to hide my camera, thank you very much).  It is a beautiful old building where they practice.   They just don't do utilitarian spaces here.  If it isn't gorgeous, it ain't getting built.  

We were in the top row, above the chandeliers.

Every flower in the ceiling was different

That lasted an hour.  Next stop, a slice of Sacher torte from the Sacher cafe in the Sacher hotel.  It's famous apparently and I was told to get it from the original bakery.  Ok, I'm nothing if not dutiful (haha, no one believes that I'm sure).  

Another elegant cafe where my Eddie Bauer outfit fit right in

Another elegant cafe where my Eddie Bauer outfit fit right in

The Sacher Torte.  I gotta say... Underwhelmed

We had a little while to wait until our next event so we went to a nearby park to enjoy the shade.  The weather has improved considerably since our rainy first day.  It is perfect weather to be honest,  but who doesn't love a shaded bench on a sunny day. 

It was nowhere near cool enough to justify penguins!  

We are quite far from the Danube so we walked to the canal that cuts through the city.  We were curious if the river was as full as it had been in Budapest.  Not so much, at least not the canal. 

Finally, it was time for the Capuchin Crypt!!  The final resting place of most of the bodies of most of the Habsburgs, the royal family.  I say most of the bodies because they buried bits of themselves in three churches.  They removed the intestines (for preservation) and buried those in St. Stephen's Cathedral.  They removed the heart and buried that in St. Augustine's.  Our Crypt guide's theory was that they were hedging their bets by having three religious orders praying for them.  They did rule most of Europe for centuries so maybe it  worked.  Of course, they had to pay the piper with that awful Habsburg inbred jaw. 

The Capuchin (origin of the name of the Capuchin monkey and of course, cappuccino coffee, the same colour as the monks' robes) Church is quite humble. At least compared to the other churches in town.  

The monks may have been humble up above but they were keepers of some pretty ostentatious royal displays of wealth and power down below.  

This was a great tour!  We got to see some amazing art/coffins and we learned a lot about the Habsburgs.  They died in childbirth a lot.  Small pox was another killer, not to mention the syphillis and other STDs.  One murder/suicide to keep things controversial.  But enough of the history, let's look at some crazy coffins!!  

These were the original two. Not too over the top.  Made of lead
Kaisser Mattias and his wife Anna.  She founded the church.

They start sort of simple and get more and more ornate 

The next two are two brothers who had to compete, even in death. 

The 'my coffin is bigger than your coffin' game peaked with the first female Empress, Maria Theresa.  Like they say, a woman has to have a coffin twice as big to be consider half as valuable, or something like that.  Anyway, this thing is HUGE.  The size of...  a tank?  A city garbage truck?  There has to be something nicer that is around the right size...  I can't think of anything.  

Anyway, she is in there with her husband.  They had a zillion kids who are all scattered around Europe, very advantageously married to royalty.  I want to say Marie Antoinette was one of them.  She was involved with this family somehow (confirmed in the link below).  Seriously, they were ruling most of Europe.  Cousins marrying cousins, uncles marrying nieces, sometimes they were the same people (cousins AND uncle/niece).  I would not want to have to do up a genealogy chart.  Way too many dotted lines criss-crossing uncomfortably. Have I mentioned that incest fueled Habsburg jaw?  Classic inbreeding example.  

some info if you are interested 

Those coffins behind are kids, wives of kids, children of kids.

The two wives of one of the sons. The middle coffin is the
first wife who died in childbirth.  You can see the tiny coffin
at the end, down below.  The closest coffin is his young daughter.  

If you read that article linked above, it mentions that the inbreeding also lead to a high infant mortality as well as they ugly jaw. 

After Marie Theresa (I think, I just assume she is the most important in any setting), things calmed down coffin-wise.  Her son that became the next emperor was more austere. He has a simple box, surrounded by his four wives (three of whom I believe died in child-birth.  And now that we are talking about multiple wives and dying, they seemed to have trouble producing boys as well, Habsburg curse perhaps?)

The last person interred in the crypt was in 2023.  She was 100 years old and the wife of one of the last of the line.  The crypt is now declared closed. The next generation will just have to find their own eternal and everlasting resting place on the outside like the rest of us. 

Back up to street level.  I do love a good cemetery and I think this might have been even better! 

Schnitzel and beer for Dinner!  

Home to an early bed. 

I was going to do the next day too but I am getting tired and that was a lot of pictures of dead people to process.  I'll finish up Vienna tomorrow.  Guat Nocht (good night). 

I know everyone is not the ghoul  I am so here is one last crypt picture that is not depressing.