I'll post about Vienna before Cambridge UK, since I have all my photos with me right now, and I'm in the Vienna airport writing the majority of this post so it seems more appropriate...
Vienna is an amazing city. Everywhere you look your mouth can drop open and linger in a dumbfounded state, admiring the incredibly beautiful architecture and historical significance of the sites. I took 137 pictures this weekend and could have taken more but honestly got tired of constantly whipping my camera out of my bag to take another picture of another beautiful building! I could write a very long post about Vienna but will mention the highlights:
- watching people skate in front of city hall (Rathaus)
- original Sacher Torte at Cafe Sacher - amazingly delicious and not too heavy
- Haus Der Musik - a museum completely devoted to audio, hearing, sound, and music - I spent about 3 hours there!
- tour of Schonbrunn castle and grounds. The castle has rooms numbering in the thousands! (thankfully the tour only covers about 40)
- eating apfel strudel at Cafe Central, complete with live piano music and an atmosphere where staying a long time is actually encouraged (newspapers available for all to read, no one hovering over your table all the time). In fact, here I shared a table with a professor from the University of Wien and his daughter, and afterward he gave me a personal 1-hour tour of the area around the Rathuas (city hall) !
- Marc Chagall exhibit, showing the murals he did for the Moscow Jewish Theatre
- Lift up to the top of Stephansplatz cathedral
- walking tour of Jewish Vienna. I could probably write an essay on this... maybe another time... needless to say the entire trip made me very sad and mournful for an entire population once thriving, decimated by the Nazis.
Saw the original wall of the ancient synagogue, buried underground, from around the year 1200!
- Jewish museum which had an enormous collection of Judaica that was gathered from the destroyed synagogues from Kristallnacht or the homes of the Jews who were forced to leave or perish
- coffee with a gentleman who claims to own Roger Moore's Rolls Royce from the film "The Spy who Loved Me" - he also has homes or apartments in Morocco, Rome, and Frankfurt. His Jaguar is parked outside Hotel Sacher and he takes his dog Pooky with him everywhere.
- trip to Bratislava by train to recruit at the university. Let's just say that the outskirts of the city have a very communist feel to it - many large, cement apartment buildings and very old city buses. Interesting that no matter where you are in the world, engineering departments at universities are generally the same!
- beautiful sunset on the train ride back to Vienna
- concert by 76-year-old pianist Alfred Brendel at the Musikverein concert hall.
I could go on and on... but best to stop here!
1 comment:
Other than Pooky always being around, this sounds like a guy to keep in touch with.
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