Vienna

Posted by Marci on Dec 2, 2010 in | 0 comments

Vienna’s old buildings look like fancy wedding cakes. Each tier is painted white, yellow, or creme and decorated in swooping curves of lovely icing. The top layers are crowned with intricate statues that celebrate the triumph of knowledge, art, music, and justice.

Church spires reach into the sky and watch over the bountiful parks and gardens filled with flowering trees. Every section of the city has a large area where lovers curl around each other on manicured lawns, children play on swings and slides, and students bend over their books. The city itself doesn’t seem to rush, but to take life at a comfortable pace.

Building facades are immaculate, scrubbed clean as if dirt couldn’t touch the beauty. Modern architecture reflects the Danube River in walls of glass. The museum quarter’s art nouveau buildings somehow fit in with the old European style of the Imperial Palace close by. If Vienna didn’t have enough contrast already between the old and new, the Kunst Haus quarter (designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser) brings the sightseer straight out of the waltz and ball gowns and into a world similar to a Dr. Seuss story. Then there’s the baroque Schönbrunn Palace, which transports the visitor back to the time of royalty.

When the architecture and museums had exhausted my mind, the friend’s I was visiting brought me to the Prater, an amusement park set in six million square meters of greenery. The rides were similar to parks in America, but each ride added a little more crazy to their height, speed, and flipping motion, which had the daredevil in me thrilled.

Wooded hiking trails and fields surround the city. We took a short tram ride from the city center and I felt like I was deep in the country where gingerbread houses reminded me of Hansel and Gretel. Here we had a picnic  reminiscent of the Sound Of Music. My friend’s daughters caught butterflies and picked dandelions while we drank wine and ate Nutella.

In the end, the best part of being in this elegant city, was spending time with my friends and being part of their family.

Schönbrunn Palace