I’m in Vienna on my own for a few days before I head home. It’s fun to be with a group but I’m always happier with hotels (and their views) when I choose my own places. Above is a good shot of St. Stephen’s Cathedral – from about 1365 – and then the view from my patio, with a really strange architectural adaption to maximize view:
Here’s the interior:
I’ve done an entire Rick Steves tour since I last posted and I promised to show you Munich and Salzburg on this trip.
But I really squandered my stays in both cities – partially due to a cold I couldn’t shake but mostly due to just not caring. As ever, I reveal these embarrassing and painful things to honor the process that is grief – to not minimize it or make it seem any easier than the unpredictable and unwieldy path that it is.
I say I’m a pretty savvy “griever” – keep on living, focus on the future, connect with friends, get out there and travel etc. etc. etc.
But I still allow myself to just plop down on the sidelines for a while and wait till I feel better. For this interlude, I invested a significant amount of time in my hotel rooms, watching the entire series The Sex Lives of College Girls on HBO Max, which revolves around 4 college girls having a lot of pretty serious sex.
Sometimes, as I’m watching, I think about how much it’s helping me understand which French kings did exist and which French kings didn’t exist.
My first Vienna hotel was the Das Tigra- where they boast that Mozart slept at age 6 and again at age 17. They’re extremely proud of this connection and so, in my room, they provided me with a suggestive photo of Mozart trying to get to second base in the 18th century, so that I can understand the depth and breadth of his musical genius:
The Vienna hotel also offers free candy that I really want to sample, but – as you may recall – the last time I took a “free” piece of candy, I spent $2000 on a dental procedure and so I am trying to practice some intelligent decision-making.
Trying to catch you up so you get the flavor of these “skipped” European cities, I offer these photos. This is the Birkenstock store outside our Munich hotel, where I happily shopped for shoes, missing Oktoberfest and the art museums completely:
Salzburg has been high on my list for years and it’s a lovely small city. I’m happy to be able to share these tourist highlights with you. Here is the brand new Salzburg Patagonia store, where I passed some time instead of seeing my intended 17th century renaissance-style Hellbrunn Palace:
Here’s the palace – from 1619 – and I’m just as sorry as you are that we missed it:
Here, instead, is the hallway carpeting of my Salzburg hotel, which is some of my favorite carpeting ever:
Here’s an actual tourist photo I took in Salzburg:
These are pedestrian signs from Salzburg, directing single men to walk wherever they want but making men dragging reluctant children with them to flow left.
On our way into Vienna, we stopped to see Melk Abbey, a Benedictine abbey from 1736:
The highlight of Melk Abbey is the library that holds 130,000 books. That incredible ceiling is a Baroque fresco from 1731, by the Austrian artist Paul Troger. It’s supposed to represent science working in harmony with religious faith:
In this close up, I cannot grasp that theme:
Compare to a piece of art from Frans Snyder in 1620 that I loved at Vienna’s Kunst Historiches Museum, called Fish Market – no interpretation necessary…they’re selling some seafood:
Melk Abbey sits in an area called the Wachau Valley:
We spent a night in a Wachau Valley village called Emmersdorf, population 1762. In the photo below, you can see the two sightseeing options available: stroll along the river or go into the church and I wandered the town endlessly without locating that upper town church, which my tour-mates found highly entertaining.
This is my second stay in Vienna. I remember we were constantly lost the first time and I’m doing only marginally better this time, despite having endless data to run my GPS.
We spent a morning in the Third Man Museum – one of those labor of love museums, designed, implemented, and overseen by one person with a fierce passion for something. Here, Gerhard Strassgschwandtner loves the movie The Third Man and life in Vienna during 1945-1955.
It takes about 5 minutes of listening to Gerhard talk…about the film, World War II, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Putin, Gustav Klimt, Mozart and more to realize that I’m in the presence of a pure genius and so I hide in the back and hope he doesn’t ask me any questions.
Here’s a few pictures of his museum. It’s divided into mini-rooms…album collections for various orchestras playing the move theme, news photos of WWII damage in Vienna, care package displays. You look at it all and you think…wow, his wife is extremely understanding!
In 2023, Gerhard managed to acquire (cost unknown) a headstone from a local graveyard – which appeared in the movie – and he moved that right into the museum.
One of my top sites in Vienna was Haus des Meeres – “House of the Sea” – it’s an aquarium built into a WWII flak tower and it’s just an incredible example of a repurposed building! Here’s the original, finished in 1944:
And here it is now:
It’s been slowly remodeled numerous times…functioning as a youth hostel in the 1960s and then, floor by floor, rising up into an 11-story vertical aquarium. Here’s the building as recently as 2019:
It’s more than an aquarium inside – there were a number of zoo exhibits as well, including some free-roaming monkeys and birds. It’s absolutely worth a low-key stop in museum-heavy Vienna!
Don’t be misled by the aquarium architecture. Vienna is full of spectacular and grand buildings. Here’s Vienna’s opera house, from 1869:
This is the Natural History museum – from 1889:
Look at the interior entrance:
There’s also Belvedere Palace – from 1723, which is now a massive art museum but was built to be a royal summer residence.
The highlight iconic art piece at the Belvedere is Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, from 1909:
It’s a special piece of art for me – I look at The Kiss every day, because Ron was a relentless cross-stitcher and he did a few Klimt pieces. He spent years on each project he did – and The Kiss – framed and on display at our house – was one of his favorites:
I’ve got a couple more days in Vienna – with one art museum and then a couple of history museums. But I’m going to close out the blog here. I’ve hit my goal for 2026 – 12 weeks in Europe – alone. I spent a lot of time – while Ron was sick – wondering if I could do it. But Ron knew I could – he told me over and over that I was to stick to my plans and carry on.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to do that. Even with my historical ignorance, societies and communities are endlessly fascinating to me. But all of this was better with Ron – I will feel his loss forever and keep his memories alive.
I’ll leave you with this classic Ron picture – Ron in top form, making an impulse purchase in Sedona. He was the master of buy now – figure out how to get it home later🙂
I’ll be back with you at Thanksgiving – when I head to Japan for a month.
