Ok, I’m back to recap to you my exciting travels of the past two days. My nose has stopped running like a leaky faucet and I appear to be able to stay up past 10 PM, so things are looking up.
Yesterday we got to see a whole bunch of stuff. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we got to see, we weren’t allowed to photograph. I feel like this has been a very picture-light trip.
John, Tim, and I headed to Stephansdom to see if we could take a cool tour. Well, we found one. John is all about things that are underground, so he was hankering to head below the surface. And what’s something interesting below the surface? Crypts. We took a tour of the crypt below Stephansdom and it was equally intriguing and gross. Since it’s, you know, a crypt, we weren’t allowed to take pictures out of respect for all of the dead folks down there. So instead I’ll paint you a (most likely unclear) picture for you.
You walk into the church, which is big and magnificent and costs a bunch of Euros to see from the center, but none to see from the edges. To get to the crypt you take a bunch of stone steps down into a large room. Then it turns into a maze of creepy, dark hallways. The first hallway we saw held the bodies of the bishops, ranging from the 1600s (I think) until 2004. We were literally standing in a hallway with coffins on shelves lining the walls. And man, some of those dudes were short.
Afterwards we wound our way to yet another hallway with shelves lining the edges. Except these shelves held lots of metal urns that had been soldered shut. Can you guess what’s in those urns? Organs. Yup, they liked to take apart their folks and bury the organs in one place, the hearts in another (which I suppose is an organ, but a pretty special one), and the bodies in a third place. It was very Egyptian of them.
As we continued to go deeper into the crypt, the creepier it got. First we walked into a room that was used to bury whoever was willing to fork over the cash to be buried in a crypt. I’m not sure “buried” is really the right word. More like, “tossed into a huge pile”. But hey, at least they were in a crypt. You can look in and see piles and piles of bones where the ordinary folk who wanted a less than ordinary afterwards were.
But, the strangest rooms were the last ones we saw. Turns out all that tossing of the random bodies into these mass graves wasn’t very space efficient. So in order to cram a few more people in there, they decided to dig up the graves, clean off the bones, and very neatly, and precisely, stack them up in smaller rooms. Their spatial relations were impressive (even to me, master of the refrigerator packing). However, seeing neatly piled rows of bones with a skull here and there facing you definitely gave me the heeby-geebies.
After the crypt tour, we met up with the rest of the folk and headed to the Belvedere. Location of our unintentional, freezing cold, walking expedition for dinner from a few nights ago.
The Belvedere is this ridiculous set (yes, there are two) of palaces that face one another and today are museums. The Upper Belvedere is a fine art museum, housing old paintings, the most famous one being “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt. And in Vienna, they are all about “The Kiss”. In case you are wondering it looks like this:
The museum was ok, but our viewing of “The Kiss” got a bit obstructed by, you know, the fashion shoot that was going on in front of it. I have no idea what it was, but there were two models, all brooding and moody, posing for a photographer, and blocking my view.
The Lower Belvedere was dedicated to the life of Prince Eugene, who built the two palaces. Apparently he was sort of the snub-nosed, puny kid who grew up to be a ridiculous soldier, art collector, and intellectual. He was totally married to his work and never married a lady, and therefore had no kids. So after he died his whole fortune went to his kind not-very-attractive, not-very-exciting niece who went about a sold lots of it. Some of his stuff they have recovered, so of it is missing, but the fella sure collected a lot of stuff in his day.
After our tour of the museum Calvin and I headed to the Naschmarkt for some lunch. We walked up and down the stalls looking for something that wasn’t sausage or schnitzel or boiled beef before settling on doeners. And boy were they delicious. I must say they were better than the doeners back home.
We also had people talking to us in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean while pressing free samples of dried mango, wasabi peanuts, and other random treats in our hands.
After lunch I headed to the Imperial Treasury where they have some of the crowned jewels and other such fancy things. My pictures weren’t terrific which is why I’m not going to share them here, but there sure was a lot of bling back in the day. My favorite thing was probably the baby throne made for the son of Napoleon which looked like the most ornate baby crib ever made (and was made of solid silver and gilded with gold) and had enough pointy edges, that it’s a good thing the baby never really sat in it or else he probably would have poked his eyes out a few dozen times.
Dinner was a pretty calm affair. We just headed to a local brew pub and got a quick bite. I think we were all kind of over the heavy meals. I ordered a salad and the waiter seemed to have no idea as to what I was talking about when I ordered it, leading me to think no one ever actually orders a salad. I’m not sure people in Austria eat salad. Or fruits. Or vegetables. I sort of wonder how they don’t all have scurvy.
I then came home and passed out which is why this post is just going up now.