Our Vienna Adventure: Day Three

We started today the same way we did yesterday: with a fantastic hotel breakfast. Automated espresso machines ensured perfect coffee, and the buffet consisted of an ample selection of juice, bread, pastries, fruit, vegetables, eggs, sausages, cheese, and cold cuts. Let's just say that we left the hotel each day extremely awake (thanks to several strong coffees) and ready to burn off quite a few calories.

With blue skies instead of the forecasted pouring rain, the Belvedere palace complex, located southeast of central Vienna, was looking its shiny best.

The Upper Belvedere is the larger of the two palaces, completed in 1724 as a summer venue for the many fancy balls and celebrations put on by Prince Eugene of Savoy.

Some of the palace rooms are on display for their architecture, while others house an impressive collection of Austrian art from medieval times to the present day. A formal garden sits between the Upper Belvedere and the Lower Belvedere,

and we passed this memorial for Anton Bruckner

as we wandered through a bit of the garden

before going into the Upper Belvedere to check out the palace rooms and art. This next photo is taken from inside the Upper Belvedere, looking across the gardens, toward the Lower Belvedere and central Vienna.

Unfortunately, photography isn't allowed in any of the Belvedere buildings, and I was lucky to get the above photo, since the Belvedere employee I asked before taking the photo said that I was welcome to aim my camera outside, but afterwards another employee in another room stopped me from taking a photo out the window, saying that cameras were not allowed to be used in the palace, regardless of where they were aimed! Although much of the garden is open, there are still a few sheltered nooks from which people were enjoying the sunshine.

We looked back at the Upper Belvedere

as we arrived at the much smaller and more reserved Lower Belvedere, which was built for the prince's personal use.

In addition to the pair of palaces, the grounds make use of two other buildings for temporary exhibitions: the Orangery

and the Palace Stables just beyond (but not visible above). The Baroque horses' stables filled with medieval art are perhaps the most interesting exhibition space in the Belvedere, and I lamented the Belvedere's ban on photography as we walked through the little-visited gem in the far corner of the Belvedere grounds. Overall, the two Belvederes contain an amazing collection of art, and I scrawled down a list of favourites that included many works by Gustav Klimt (The Kiss, Watersnakes, Judith I, After the Rain, Lady at Fireplace), Egon Schiele (Four Trees, Sunflowers, Wall), Carl Moll (Dusk), and Herbert Boeckl (Houses in Old Berlin), although the parenthetical works are the only ones I could find images for online. With one last wander through the gardens,

we left the Belvedere and headed to St Marxer Friedhof, a small cemetery just south of the palace grounds. We took a wrong turn near the cemetery, but luckily a city worker raking leaves at the next intersection spotted us and yelled our way, twice (we didn't turn around the first time). After we made our limited language skills clear, he said, "Friedhof?" ("Cemetery?") and we nodded. He pointed down the next street and then curved his arm around to show the way we should go. We thanked him and smiled, and he smiled back and waved goodbye. As we spotted the cemetery entrance,

we smiled once again at the friendliness of the Viennese--nothing like this little demonstration of kindness and concern for strangers would have happened in London, that's for sure. Our first glimpse of the cemetery was postcard-perfect: sunshine, autumn leaves, and a lone woman perched on a bench beside the main boulevard.

This sign suggests that the cemetery has its less photogenic days, with the image making it seem as if the trees sometimes come alive and chase down unsuspecting people!

The pretty grounds are filled with gravestones dating from the nearly 100 years that the cemetery was open for burials.

Most of the graves look quite unattended, but this was one of two that obviously received regular grooming. I hadn't heard of Joseph Madersperger at the time, but have since learned that he is considered one of the inventors of the sewing machine, and that his grave is tended by members of Vienna's tailors' guild.

The second memorial that stands out in the cemetery was the reason we came to this quiet corner of Vienna. Like most people at the time, Mozart was placed in a communal grave without any mourners present at his actual burial. It is still not known exactly where he was buried, but this memorial was erected in the mid-1800s in what is thought to be the approximate location of his final resting place.

We caught a tram from the cemetery and wondered what we should have for lunch when the tram stopped directly outside another location of our beloved Trzesniewski. It seemed too good to be true--perfect food that we knew we could be eating in minutes--so in we went.

While we ate our modest (in size, not in flavour!) lunch, we watched people pop in for one or two tiny delights and then go on their way. It really is the perfect pitstop food.

The outside of this particular location is decorated with a series of amusing cartoons whose characters share our love of Trzesniewski. My favourite is the "bread catastrophe" in the Atlantic, with all those soggy open-faced treats floating away.

After lunch, we wandered through a quiet residential neighbourhood

on our way to one of the unexpected architectural wonders of Vienna: Hundertwasserhaus.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser designed this 1986 makeover of a block of social housing, waiving his fee because he considered the opportunity to rescue the site from an ugly building as payment enough. The resulting building contains more than fifty apartments filled with sloping floors (Hundertwasser sought to remove any straight lines from his organic designs), a riot of textures, and residents who put up with the steady stream of visitors to this intriguing building.

After we finished staring, we continued through the neighbourhood

back toward the city centre. Karlsplatz is near the southern point of the Ringstrasse, and two identical Otto Wagner buildings stand in the square:

One houses the Wien Museum, while the other contains a café.

Nearby stands one of Vienna's most famous churches, Karlskirche,

which is meant to be Vienna's most impressive Baroque church. Since admission isn't free and we felt we had seen quite a few churches already (and would see more before we left the city), we just stopped for a look at the imposing exterior (and the Henry Moore sculpture in front of the church) before moving on.

A short walk down a nearby side street (still with interesting sights of its own)

led to what would become one of our favourite parts of Vienna: the glorious, wonderful, amazing Naschmarkt. I love open-air markets and we've seen quite a few in our travels, but the Naschmarkt is something pretty special. Stalls selling all manner of produce and prepared foods for takeaway stretch for more than a kilometre, making for a lovely (and tempting) stroll.

Now this is some fresh sauerkraut!

Ah, but the magic of Naschmarkt is that it's not just one long line of stalls--there are two pedestrian market alleys running parallel to each other. The second parade of culinary wonder is filled with places for eating and drinking on the spot, ranging from cheap and casual to fancier and pricier. Choices, choices, choices.

The most popular drink we saw people enjoying was the sturm that Bob tried last night--red and white varieties were being sold everywhere, and the signs advertising the autumnal treat always had exclamation points in them.

My only regret about Naschmarkt was that we weren't going to be in Vienna on a Saturday, when a flea market joins all the food on one end of the market. Interesting food markets make me a bit giddy, and quirky flea markets bring a huge smile to my face, so the combination of the two in one location may just be TOO much perfection to take. There's even a pair of iconic Otto Wagner buildings directly beside the market.

Both were completed in 1899, and while the corner building is beautiful,

the neighbouring building is the more often praised:

Nicknamed Majolikahaus because of the outer layer of majolica tiles onto which this amazing design is imprinted,

its balconies are especially gorgeous.

Ah, but there's still more beauty to be found in the vicinity of Karlsplatz! Built in 1898 as the headquarters and central exhibition space for the Secession movement, this next building is a wonder of detail. The Secession motto, "To every time its art, to art its freedom," that sits just below the building's domed roof, was briefly removed by the Nazis, but overlooks the entrance once again.

The first and second floors house exhibition spaces for rotating contemporary exhibits in keeping with the society's aim to present art that has "a willingness to experiment." Klaus Weber's Unfolding Cul-de-Sac was one piece that made me smile: the installation contains a demonstration of the pavement mushroom's power to push through and destroy asphalt,

with a mushroom collector's hut at the centre,

filled with humorous bits

and a map detailing collection sites in and around Vienna.

This fridge was beside the main installation,

and I was confused when I opened it to find, well, I wasn't quite sure what I had found!

A quick glance at the exhibition pamphlet explained what we were being invited to help ourselves to: "Klaus Weber puts a piece of the mycelium of this mushroom at the disposal of visitors to the Secession with the idea of spreading it further and deliberately sowing urban 'chaos.'" Very funny! Upstairs, Ralo Mayer's take on a biosphere consists of "a closed ecosystem of shrimps, seaweed, and microorganisms that cast their shadow on the wall," to eerily beautiful effect.

The most famous and mesmerising Secession exhibit is in the basement (where, sadly, photography isn't allowed): Gustav Klimt's Beethoven Frieze. Incredible as it seems now, the painting was only intended to exist for the duration of the 1902 Secession exhibition, but was preserved because the Secession planned a 1903 retrospective of Klimt's work and kept the piece intact until that exhibition. The piece then remained hidden from the general public from 1903 until 1986 as it was sold, dismantled, stored, sold again, stolen by the Nazis, returned to its Jewish owners, sold again (this time to the Republic of Austria), restored (over a decade), and kept in storage for a final year while the special exhibition space was built in the Secession building. It's quite a sight. If you're interested, you can learn more about the extraordinary piece on the Secession website. After spending about two hours in the Karlsplatz area, we moved further west along the Ringstrasse and entered the rather formidable MuseumsQuartier, a 14-acre site that opened in 2001, filled with museums, galleries, arts spaces, restaurants, cafés, shops, and outdoor plazas for gathering. We would barely make a dent in the MuseumsQuartier; the more we saw of Vienna, the more we couldn't believe how much culture was packed into this relatively small city. We started at the most-often visited institution in the MuseumsQuartier: the Leopold Museum. The private collection of Rudolf and Elisabeth Leopold contains the world's largest Egon Schiele collection as well as numerous pieces by Secession artists (including Klimt). The building is enormous, the collection is sprawling,

and if we were going to be able to take in any of it, we needed another dose of Viennese coffee and cake! Luckily, the Leopold's architect believes that space for eating and drinking within a museum is integral to the museum experience, and Café Leopold is as stylish and satisfying as the rest of the museum.

We savoured our mohntorte (poppy-seed cake)

and although we didn't have any "real" food in the café, the menu offerings and the food we saw our neighbours eating looked very tempting, especially considering that the Leopold bucks the usual museum-café trend of either being cafeteria-like, with little ambiance, or stuffily upscale, with ridiculous prices to match. It's actually a place that I would consider going to even if I weren't visiting the museum--and I can't say that about many museum restaurants. Suitably fortified, we moved into the gallery spaces, which were wonderfully designed, spacious, and included amazing touches that more museums should have, like headphones in some galleries that played music relevant to the paintings on display, which meant that we listened to Mahler and Schoenberg while gazing at some of the works. As for Schiele, I came away with a feeling that I don't think I've experienced with any other artist: with very few exceptions, I disliked his portraits and was hypnotised by his landscapes. Very confusing. Some Schiele landscapes I loved (and for which I could find online images) include Setting Sun (1913), Autumn Tree in Wind (1912), Crescent of Houses ("Island Town") (1915), Krumau on the Moldau (1913/14), Wall and House in Hilly Landscape with Fence (1911), Dead City (1911), House with Shingle Roof (1915), and House Wall by the River (1915), and one of the only Schiele portraits I liked was his eerie self-portrait, Self-Seer (Death and Man) (1911). Other gems from the Leopold include: Richard Gerstl's On the Danube Canal (1907) and Klimt's Death and Life (1910/15), Approaching Thunderstorms (The Large Poplar II) (1903), and Tranquil Pond (1899). Unfortunately, I couldn't find online images of other paintings I liked by Carl Moll, Tina Blau, Koloman Moser, Gerda Leopold, Kurt Weber, Josef Dobrowsky, and Georg Philipp Wörlen, which makes me doubly regret the museum's ban on photography (and the giftshop's lack of postcards of most of my favourite works). In any case, we left the Leopold thoroughly impressed with the collection, museum, and café, and decided that we had just enough time to visit a second museum before it closed: MUMOK, Vienna's contemporary art museum, located directly opposite the Leopold.

The usually black cube was alight with a video installation of scurrying mice for this evening's late opening,

and when we got inside the rather crowded building, we learned that tonight was the opening night for a major new exhibition AND that in honour of the opening, the museum was free from 7:00 P.M. We happened to walk in the door at 7:20 P.M.! Since we had expected to spend €18 for two adult admissions, we were very pleased with our good fortune at being able to visit the museum for free. The crowds were all on the lower floors taking in the new exhibition, which meant that we had the permanent collection practically to ourselves!

A few highlights from the permanent collection include: René Magritte's La voix du sang (1959),

Otto Freundlich's Forces (1934),

Giacomo Balla's Mercurio passa davanti al sole visto nel cannocchiale (1914),

Walter Dexel's Composition IV (1925),

and Albert Gleizes's Les ponts des Paris (Passy) (1912).

The exhibition opening tonight was a Peter Kogler retrospective, and many of the pieces were great fun, especially with a rather hip Vienna crowd milling about.

People wove their way through a metal maze that resembled an especially demented airport queue:

One darkened room contained an installation of glowing ants created by flashes of light aimed at phosphorescent paint. Over time, the ants faded and new ones appeared--a simple idea, but one that had us adults giggling like little kids.

The most fun was in the largest room, where rapidly changing video projections on all four walls make the viewers feel as if they are the ones who are moving and shifting.

The soundtrack contributed to the sense of movement and change (something that I can't really convey in still photos, unfortunately, but there are videos that can better show what I mean, if you're interested), and we stayed in the room for quite a while, taking in the show.

Although I'd heard some criticisms of the MUMOK building before our visit, I quite liked the layout of the museum and the whole place had a great feeling on this packed-out opening night.

We wandered for a bit around the MuseumsQuartier grounds and found the largest Space Invader murals we've ever seen!

Since it was now after 9:00 P.M., supper was firmly on our minds, and we wandered out of the MuseumsQuartier, past the enormous Kunsthistorisches (Art History) Museum, one of Vienna's must-see places that we wouldn't get around to seeing--with the fourth largest collection of paintings in the world, as well as numerous galleries full of antiquities, it's apparently one of those places that you can spend the entire day in without feeling like you've even begun to see the collection.

We headed into the neighbourhood near the university in search of cheap, plentiful eats

and found just what we were looking for in this rabbit warren of basement dining rooms serving humble dishes at fantastically humble prices.

Just looking at Bob's "plate" put me into meat overload, but he relished his mixed grill with a tall mug of beer that matched his food in size,

while I loved my gulasch (meat instead of last night's veggie version), topped with a hearty dumpling, fried egg, and a dash of pickle.

After climbing up all those stairs to get back up to street level, we hopped on the nearby tram, arriving back at the hotel just before midnight, full of the culinary and cultural delights of this great city. We love Vienna!