A Warm Welcome to Vienna

The view from our hostel window,
right across from the Naschmarkt

It’s been an exciting first couple of days in Vienna! We landed on the evening of the 6th and had a delicious dinner at Zwolf Apostelkeller, where I had my first schnitzel and apple strudel of the trip. After dinner it was around 10pm and I was ready to head to bed after not getting any sleep on the 9 hour flight we had from Seattle to London. 

The morning of the 7th was spent on an amazing walking tour of the city! I thoroughly enjoyed hearing the history behind some of the most noteworthy buildings in Vienna. We began the tour at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, which was absolutely stunning. 

St. Stephens Cathedral

One thing that intrigues me about architecture of churches is all of the statues and the stories they tell on the outside. Everything about the way the church was built was intentional and the amount of detail is incredible. One example of this that our tour guide, Herbert, explained, is that when they built the church they built it specifically so that the altar would be on the east so that when the sun rose the first light would shine on the altar. That meant that the main entrance to the church was on the west side, so they carved specific things, including Jesus over the entrance to keep the darkness out of the church. You could spend an entire day just examining the cathedral, climbing the 343 steps to the top of the tower, and taking a tour of the catacombs. Thanks to Herbert I ended the tour with a newfound awe, but also comfort for the city of Vienna.

Later that day we had a tour of the Schönbrunn Palace, which I enjoyed a lot more than I expected! I had heard of the Habsburgs and Maria Theresa, but it was amazing to get to see exactly where they resided during the summer and hear about what exactly was required as an emperor and empress. When I first arrived I was taken aback by just how large the Palace was, which I later learned has over a thousand rooms. Our tour guide did explain that the Palace in and of itself was a city as there were hundreds of servants, guards, etc. that all lived there with their families. During our tour we explored the chambers of Franz Joseph and Elisabeth of Bavaria, as well as his office of sorts. We got to see the chambers of Maria Theresa, including the bed throne combination where she sat or laid while she was pregnant and was meeting with people to show that even though she was pregnant and needed to rest, she was still in control and powerful and should not be messed with. I learned on this tour that even though Maria Theresa was never given the title of empress, she dealt with all of the political issues that a typical emperor would do, and her husband, the named emperor would deal with the social things such as marrying off their children to other high powerful families. Going off of that, we got to see the portraits of their 17 children and our tour guide explained that although the sisters especially all look extremely similar, they were just painted that way so that no sister would look more attractive than the other and the family would then have to be okay with taking any of the sisters for marriage. If fact, our tour guide was constantly reminding us that the portraits that were painted back then were just as much photoshopped as they are now! 

As with the cathedral, every piece of architectural detail around the palace was purposeful. One of the main examples of this was the use of gold around the palace. As electricity was not added to the palace for a long time each room was lit with candles, and very few at that because it would become too hot if there were a large amount of them. Therefor it would be hard for guests to tell whether the extremely large amount of gold used in each room was real gold, gold leaf, or not even gold at all. The guests, often leaders of other countries, couldn’t really ask what it was made out of, and so the hope would be that they would assume the worst and assume that it was real gold. The reason for that being that they would see how much gold was used and think “if they’re spending this much just on decoration, how much must they be willing to spend on their army” and would then decide not to go to war against Austria. In fact all of the gold was just wood with gold leaf on top, but they wouldn’t know that. Every single room was filled with ornate decorations which were mostly used to show wealth, and therefore power. Once the tour was over I found myself wishing that it would last another hour, I was enjoying myself so much!