Vienna

This weekend was a quick one, but to a beautiful city nonetheless. Taylor had a field trip on Friday morning, so we decided on Vienna for just a quick day trip on Saturday. We agreed to meet up with one of our friends, Catherine, once we arrived, and Brandon decided to come with us to do an onsite investigation for class.

So, Brandon and I met Taylor in Brussels after her field trip on Friday and we set off on the looooong trip to Vienna that afternoon. The train rides there were bearable, and I finally saw “Anchorman” for the first time, courtesy of Brandon’s vast and portable movie collection. On ICE trains you typically move around a lot unless you have a reservation, but this time around it allowed for meeting some really interesting people. I met a girl on our last train, Jasmin, who was on her way home to Lake Constance from Red Cross training because she is moving to Uganda for a year in September to work with handicapped children. She told me she was 19, and was surprised when I told her we were the same age. She had just finished high school (because the German school system is 13 years of school), the German government is paying for her trip to Africa, and then she will come home after a year and attend university for free. Let’s get it together, America.

Anyway, we finally boarded our night train at 11:40 in Munich and were out for the night on our correctly-booked couchettes, praise the sweet Lord. We made a hurried exit from the train the next morning when the conductor gave us a little-too-quick notice that we had reached our stop. Brandon’s tennis shoes were stolen somewhere along the way, leaving him with only dress shoes, but we made it off and onto the next very nice Austrian train for a whopping seven minutes before arriving at our final destination. We had a brief struggle with the hotel directions, but eventually found it and paid the €20 extra to check in at 8am instead of 3pm.

Showers are always a necessity after night trains (or, in my opinion, any time on trains), so we took full advantage of our private shower since we were in a hotel instead of a hostel. The nice thing about traveling over night is that you have the whole morning. By the time we all got ready to go it was only 9:30 so we headed into the square. This provided for some great people watching and we took a little venture into St. Stephen's Cathedral, more impressive on the outside than inside.

We hopped on the free (though we paid €6,70 for a ticket before finding out it was in fact not necessary) metro to Schönbrunn Palace to meet Catherine. We sat outside and enjoyed the beautiful sunshine and hilarious Asian tourists before our tour started.

The palace was beautiful, and included more history than I had realized going in. This was home to the Habsburg family, including Maria Theresa, a great Empress of Austria as well as Marie Antoinette’s mother, and her grandson, Franz Josef, was another beloved emperor. Most of the palace centered around him and his wife, Elizabeth, who had a whole world of issues, namely her ANKLE-LENGTH HAIR (ow) and anorexia, also the fact that her mother-in-law hated her. Then there was Maria Theresa who had 16 children. Again, ow.

Technically there's no photography allowed, but I just couldn’t pass up a picture of the room where a 6-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart played his first concert ever. My inner piano nerd had a little moment here. This man wrote sonatas and minuets as a child that I can’t play with fourteen years of piano experience. Y’all, he was IN THIS ROOM. Greatness.

After the tour we walked around the backyard. Not too shabby, I guess.

We took a metro back to the train station to get some food (soft pretzel count at this point was 2) then went back to the hotel to change for the opera. Brandon decided to opt out of the ballet, but Catherine and Taylor and I navigated our way to the Vienna State Opera House. We found the line for standing room tickets, paid a whole €4, and got in line after snapping a few pictures in the foyer. This line led us to a balcony with some bars to lean against with roughly 500 of our closest friends. Also, have I mentioned that Europeans smell?

Despite the 2+ hours of standing in heels, this was by far my favorite thing we did in Vienna. This city is home to an outstanding number of the biggest composers of all time, and the musical culture is incredible. We only stayed for the first act, but the first two numbers were enough to make it worth it. The first was a Haydn piece danced by a chorus along with two leads, both of whom were very talented. The second had two couples and an additional male dancer, danced to a Tchaikovsky piece. We watched another Liszt piece that I appreciated less, but it was still beautiful.

*Cheese alert* I think I secretly wish I could’ve been a ballerina. But, I quit dance when I was seven and instead I had to settle for being put in every ballet number in all musicals because my faithful director also wanted me to be a ballerina. The fact of the matter was that I had the build and the “look” but lacked the grace and, you know, skill. Regardless, it has only been recently that I have realized the extreme appreciation that came from my years in theatre. I watched the performance tonight completely differently than many of the people around me, I think. I know those dancers have physically done those routines thousands of times, but performed them in their heads millions more. They’ve worked tirelessly to perfect one tiny motion that 99% of the audience won’t even notice, but it doesn’t matter because they will know they got it just right. That’s part of the thrill of the stage. I’m convinced that I’ll never attend any type of performance without wishing, however slightly, that I could perform again, but I will also never underappreciate a show. Even if I only stay for one act and want to kill the loud clapping man behind me and leave the theatre nauseous from the BO of my fellow patrons. *End overdramatized sentimentality*

We found the closest benches we could and just sat for a little while to let our feet recover. We then walked around the plaza a little, which with just a few turns turned into the same square we had spent the morning in. We found a restaurant for dinner where I had something similar to chicken nuggets and some French fries—such a good decision. We walked Cat back to her hostel then took the train back to our hotel to shower, pack, and write our reports on the day.

Another long day of travel started at 9am Sunday morning. Our first train left Vienna at 8:52 and went just swimmingly, which should've tipped us off that the rest of the day would be not so smooth. The first train was seven hours long, putting us in Frankfurt. From there, every train after that was delayed. On top of that, for some reason we still haven't figured out the train that was supposed to take us all the way to Heerlen stopped in Herzongrath (or something like that). Luckily we asked someone rather than trusting the train schedules and found out we had to take a bus to Heerlen. Add another hour. Train back to Maastricht, bus back to Teikyo and finally we made it home by 11:30. Taylor keeps having to remind me that the journey is where the memories will come from more so than the actual destination. So while this weekend did consist of beautiful gardens and ballerinas and palaces, the best part was playing slap games in the train station and stocking up on our favorite chocolate at the mini grocery stores and learning how to get out of a headlock in the middle of an Aachen train platform.