Vienna - Day 3

After feeling some pressure to knock more and more of the multitude of Vienna's sights off the list, it felt strange to be approaching this day with only two items on the to-do list. I guess that had mostly to do with the magnitude of those sights - the Schonbrunn Palace and the Vienna Opera House.

First was Schloss Schonbrunn, another one of the Habsburg's Palaces. You know how it goes, when you get tired of knocking around the 1000+ rooms of the Hofburg, or you just can't stand anymore gold brocade you need another small 1000+ room palace to retreat to.

In order to keep some of our energy for walking the immense grounds we decided to take the subway. We got a quick tour of the Naschmarkt on the way there. The Naschmarkt is one of Vienna's outdoor markets, specialising in food, spices and produce. It was incredible how many different types of olives you can have shoved in your direction over a mere 200 meters. And they were stuffed with any and every substance known to man. The flea market set up at the end was similar. We had trouble thinking of items that we didn't see. It was this huge semi-organized jumble of people's old junk.

The subway was as efficient and easy as you expect it should be in Austria and we were soon at the Palace. We bought some tickets to tour the inside of the palace, but since it's usually quite busy you are assigned a specific start and end time during which you can tour. We had about an hour before our timeslot so we started touring the gardens. We began in the Crown Prince's garden which was a small side garden, nicely laid out in two sections - one sort of flower & hedge design and a second part that had a whole bunch of citrus trees around an ancient yew tree. The different types of limes, oranges and lemons were all gnarly and ancient looking.

We spent a little bit of time looking over the massive back gardens, all the way to the Neptune Fountain and the Gloriette at the top of the hill. It was truly mind-blowing and absolutely stunning.

Our tour of the house was fun and initiated a lot of comparisons to the Hofburg and Versailles. The styles were very similar, with lots of gold - probably too much gold. The most striking rooms were small antechambers built to hold Marie-Theresa's Chinese pottery collections. They were these small oval rooms with beautiful inlaid designs on the floor and dozens of small shelves holding the vases.

Post-tour we hit the Palace restaurant for some sausage and sauerkraut. The patio was populated with fat, sassy little sparrows that dove in and out between the tables. There was an old man a few seats down who was kindly sharing his cream torte with them. It was quite cute to see them hop up and take a few bites while the old man attacked the torte from the other side with knife and fork.

Suitably fuelled we spent some more time walking in the gardens, touring the tree-lined lanes to see statues and fountains. We really liked the faux Roman ruins, specially designed in the 1700's to look like authentic ruins, then left in disrepair for so long that they started to more and more resemble their inspiration.

After spending a suitable amount of time gawping at the Neptune Fountain and getting some nice shots of the gardens, we hiked up the hill to the Gloriette, a small building at the top which you could climb to get an even better view.

We left Schonbrunn tired but happy, having seen another one of Vienna's must-see attractions.

We went back to the hotel to pretty up for our night at the Opera House. We were quite excited. Even though we had seen Giselle before, it had been with a touring company and we were expecting a much higher level. Plus, the venue itself was a thing to behold. Although it was absolutely enormous on the outside and the seating ran up for 5 stories, it felt small and intimate, a perfect place for a good ballet. It felt grand to be part of the smartly dressed masses making our way into the theatre.

The ballet itself was superb. Although we were both impressed with the two leads, but even more impressed with the two secondary leads. The sets were magnificent and staging was great. The orchestra brought it all together. All-in-all a fabulous night, even if we had to run through the rain to catch a taxi back to the hotel. If you're ever in Vienna, find a reason to see something at the StatsOper.