Vienna - Mostly Mozart

A relatively short entry -

Friday night when I got back from the ballet, there was an English movie on the TV about the life of Mozart. It wasn’t a documentary-style movie but more of a Hollywood rendition, regardless, it really peeked my interested about Mozart. I never knew he was regarded as so childish with a crazy giggle and first played for the Empress in the Schoenbrunn Palace (which I got to actually go visit that exact room he played in when he got his start – I will talk more about that in the next entry) when he was SIX years old! He was already a music prodigy at age 6! Why didn’t I know this?

Anyway, this movie succeeded at peeking my interest enough to wake up on Saturday morning and head straight to Mozart’s house here in Vienna. I knew it was close to the St. Stephan’s Cathedral but I didn’t realize that I walked right by it until I purposely went looking for it on the map. So I went to Mozart’s Home here in Vienna, which is preserved now like a museum. What an awesome experience to really have history brought to life like that!

*Note: this is not Mozart's House - but it's one of the gazillion stores in Vienna that serve to please the Mozart fanatic. Like most museums, I was not able to use my camera inside Mozart's house.

Staatsoper - Vienna - Free Ballet!

On Friday I decided to go to this place. The Stattsoper is an operahouse which stages ballets and operas from around the world on an almost daily basis. There is a whole lot of history here. In fact, I later learned that part of it was bombed in the past (during the war) and rebuilt to be the beauty it is. I decided that I had never seen a ballet in my life (although I think when I was REALLY young in New York I may have seen the nutcracker – but that doesn’t count cause I barely remember it) so now was the time. When I walked into this place I realized 1. The Ballet was a big deal. Man am I glad that I actually dressed up. The place was packed with people wearing their finest. 2. Everything is German. Not even an English sign that said Tickets Sold Here or something could be found. So as usual, I followed the masses and stood in any lineup I saw.

My eyes were wandering around at the beautiful architecture and the people around me when I found this old lady (probably in her 60’s) smiling at me. I checked to make sure she was looking at me and she walked over. I must have looked more puzzled than I thought standing in that lineup because she spotted me a mile away as a tourist. In sweet broken English she said: “Hello, I have ticket for you – you come with me.”….HUH? Considering she didn’t look like something to be too scared of, I did as she asked. She walked me over to coat check, took my coat and got it hung with hers and then walked ahead of me into the main floor….like 5 rows from the stage! Before I sat down I finally said to her “how much?” to which she replied “Free”. …. Again… HUH? She smiled and explained to me as best as she could in English why she was doing this for me as her husband joined us. From what I understood, she and her husband come with a good friend of hers often and that friend was sick that night so she was looking for someone who was alone who would want to - simply not let the ticket go to waste… must have been why she was smiling when she saw my puzzled face circling the room. It must have been obvious that I was a first-timer. LOL So holy cow! Sometimes I think I’m sitting on a lucky horse shoe! How awesome is that? I go to my first ballet in Vienna, prepared to pay a hefty fee for probably a shitty seat in the back upper balcony and I end up in FOR FREE, conversing with a sweet old couple, only a few rows away from the stage! Not bad if I may say so myself!

The show, the whole experience turned out to be awesome. In fact, as I was watching these men and women on stage defying gravity and laws of human limb movement – I started to think I may have been a ballerina in a past life. I Sooooo wanted to do what they were doing. It was so beautiful to watch and I felt like I was completely connected with the women on stage, the orchestra in front of me and the beautiful music and of course the storyline. It was an experience to remember. As I am all about experiences in life lately – check that on my list of things to do before I die. In fact, I may have to do it again and again sometime in the future, I enjoyed it that much.

Vienna, Austria - Continued

My time in Vienna is soon coming to an end so I’ve running around like a crazy woman in the past two days (since the conference ended) to get my time’s worth out of this trip and to soak in as much Austrian culture as possible. In the end, this culture is definitely one that I can get used to. Although, I have to say, this 6 hour time difference is getting the better of me. On the bright side, when I wake up here, it’s like 1am back home so needless to say I will have no problems going to sleep and waking up bright and early when I return. On the flip side – I’m going to be hungry for breakfast at like 3am. Ouch. Speaking of breakfast, I noticed something funny this morning. Feeling particularly jet-lagged (still, even after a week here) I decided to have a cup of coffee. As I reached for the sugar I noticed that there was another little cup thing filled with packets…not of sugar but of pills… Tylenol (I think) – at least that’s what they looked like. I thought that was pretty genius. It’s like the hotel’s way of saying “rough night? Come have breakfast with us, we’ll take care of you”. :)

Anyway, to summarize, I went to a live Ballet, a slew of Museums, Mozart’s House, the Oldest Zoo in the world (with animals that I don’t see much of in North America so that was super sweet!) and the Palaces and living quarters of the Emperors and Empresses of Vienna’s past. Like any other place I’ve visited in the world, I’ve found some things that I love (specifically with regards to food – as is usually the case) and others that I’m not so fond of (such as Austrians being amongst the people who smoke the most in the world – i.e. still smoking in bars).

Over the next few days, I will recap my experiences at many of these places and solidify why I think that Vienna is such a great city to explore! Stay tuned!

Vienna, Austria - The Begining

Here I am in Vienna, the beautiful capital of Austria. I am at the halfway point of my trip now so I thought I would take a moment to update so I don’t forget some awesome details of this trip so far.

First and foremost, I never thought I would say this but Austrian Airlines is such a great airline! You walk on board and they are handing out bottles of water for you. The inside of the plane is amazing – spacious, fun bright colors, clean and the 1^st class cabin is just out of this world (no, I didn’t get to fly 1^st class on this trip). To finish up about the airline, the food was actually delicious, I got both dinner and breakfast served on the flight along with FREE DRINKS… By the way, helpful tip: Don’t mix sleeping pills with white wine unless you REALLY want to sleep for a very long time. LOL Anyway, aside from the fact that they run few direct flights to Austria from Toronto in the week (making the flight usually full of families and lots and lots of kids), it was a great experience and I would definitely fly with them again.

I arrived in Vienna early on Monday and checked into the hotel and took a nice long nap until about noon when I decided to venture out and grab a map and start to explore. Here are a few observations that I made immediately:

· I don’t speak or read a word of German… this is not the best situation to be in when trying to learn your way around a map in this city.

· Taking a taxi is not the best solution because not only can I not read the map very well, I can’t pronounce where I want to go to the taxi driver. Solution – Take public transit. The subway here saved me a lot of Euro in capfare but was also quite easy to navigate with the big signs that spelled out the places I wanted to go to.

· Signs here are wacky - At least, different from what I’m used to. For example, blue circles with red Xs in them – what do they mean? It’s been 3 days and I still haven’t a clue. I also can’t tell the difference between exit signs and bathroom signs in most places. In fact most doors have what looks like a bathroom sign hanging next to it (ssilhouettes of man and woman, separated by a line) but I think it just means that it’s a public room for both genders? I can go on and on about some signs that I’ve seen, which for the most part, cause me to stop and stare with a puzzled look while I try to figure out what I’m supposed to do. Even the cross or do not cross signals at crosswalks are confusing! In the end, I find myself just following the local’s lead.

· Austrians are no Vegetarians. – I learned pretty quick that just about every café or diner/restaurant in the city’s center claims to have the BEST “Wiener Schnitzel” in the city. These are basically sausagy-type hot dogs that are servevd cut up in tiny pieces on a plate with a toothpick-like fork. They’re actually pretty good.

· Austrians LOVE chocolate. – It didn’t take me too much time to notice that the bakeries and cafes were also ALL competing with eachother to sell what are called “Sacher Tarte” – pronounced more like “soccer-tart”. Simply put this is death by chocolate. I got to go behind the counter at one shop and watch the little old lady in the back make me one. She put layers of chocolate on top of more layers of chocolate and as my eyes widened, she asked me in sweet broken English if I wanted whipped cream on top of it! DON’T MIND IF I DO, I said. Hahahaha Delicious is an understatement – it’s a good thing I’m only here for a week or all my bootcamps would go down the toilet.

I didn’t stay about too late on Monday cause I was still pretty tired so I found my way back to the hotel and ate some dinner in the lounge and before I knew it, I was seeing some familiar faces of other delegates for this conference, whom I’ve seen and met at past conferences. What was supposed to be an early night on Monday turned into lots of late night cocktales with new aquaintances in the lounge. Fun times.

Tuesday I got up pretty early (8am here would be like 1am back home I think), worked out for a while to erase the guilt of eating that Sacher Tart the day before, and then took off to explore the Spanish Riding School. Someone told me that they offer shows a few times a week at this place called MORGENARBEIT – SPANISCHE HOFREITSCHULE, Bundesgestut Piber, which is a school for the most beautiful royal equestrian white horses. The website didn’t show any shows going on that day but it did say that visitors can come in any morning at from 10am-Noon to watch the morning exercises. Here I saw some horses do things that I didn’t know horses could do – like stand up on their hind legs and hop up and down, walk sideways and even backwards in synch with eachother, trot while lifting their legs up super high in an almost dancing-like motion and so much more….have you ever seen a horse do that? It was incredible. It's too bad they threatened to kick me out if I took anymore pictures...

I left the Riding School and started taking pictures of the amazing architecture surrounding me.

I kept walking and exploring until I found myself at STEPHANSPLATZ, the site of Stephansdom, also knows as St. Stephans Cathedral. As I opened the giant doors to peek in, I noticed immediately the smell of – well – OLD. That’s right… it just smelled REALLY old. I saw a lot of tourist looking people walking around taking pictures so I followed suite. I couldn’t resist trying to capture the beauty and enormousness of this amazing place on camera. When I felt like I had enough of the old mistyness and dim lighting of the inside of this place, I ventured back out onto the street.

Some things to note here – most of the streets in the downtown core of this city are pedestrian only cobblestone. When you do reach a crossroad with a few cars on it, it was actually overwhelming how many horse and buggies took over these streets. From what I could tell, it just made no sense to drive here cause you’d get stuck behind a horse and carraige. In addition to that, when I realized how easily I stumbled from the Riding School to Stephansplatz, and how I wanted as many pictures of the beautiful architecture as I could get – I quite literally put my map away and just wandered around for hours. It was refreshing and pleasant to be lost and have no idea what direction I was walking in (those who know me, know how bad my sense of direction is haha). It’s not like I could read or make much sense of the map in German anyway. Every time I turned a corner or approached a new plaza, I was pleasantly surprised with a beautiful statue or building or museum to walk in and explore. I probably walked for about 7hrs straight on Tuesday.

Once in a while I would find a subway station and venture underground. The interesting thing here to note is that the subway and public transport system here is almost EXACTLY the same as what I found n Barcelona, Spain – people TRUST people here! I bought a pass for the week for 14Euros and then when I got to the subway, I couldn’t find a place to swipe the card or even put it in a machine to punch…nothing. Again, I was following the locals and I realized that nobody had passes in their hands. After inquiring about it, I was told that everyone should have one but they don’t need to use them. Occasionally the local authorities do spot checks of everyone coming off of a subway car and I guess if you’re caught without a pass the fine is quite hefty. Amazing. When will Canada catch up to this European concept of trust I wonder?

After a while, I found myself in the governmenty part of the city, specifically RATHAUSPLATZ – aka. City Hall Plaza. Let me just say – their city hall is unlike any city hall I’ve ever seen. I’ll let the photo do the talking here: (photo) I walked around to the back of the building and found that during the months of Feb and March, they turn the entire property into a giant ice-skating festival - Vienna Ice Dream AWESOME. I immediately found out where to rent the skates and off I went circling the crazy obstacle on ice-skates. What a great little place to run into. After a few hours the place corwded up with some pushy kids who quite literally almost caused me to fall on my ass so I figured it was time to go at that point.

I found my way back to the hotel around 6:30pm and got ready to go out to a pre-conference event that was planned at a local pub, which I later found out has a whole lot of history to it. This place is called BITZINGER, located in historic AUGUSTINERKELLER, once part of Vienna’s 16^th Century-built defensive fortification. It was a great pub, with great local beer, an awesome buffet of food – all FREE of charge. Not a bad way to end a perfect day.

Wednesday and Thursday have been non-stop business conference days – with presentations from leading experts in my industry across the world. Wednesday night however was the official conference-sponsored party. To make a long story short here I got to get all dressed up fancy, ate a whole lot of food, drank a whole lot of champaign(again, all FREE of charge) and made a whole lot of new contacts around the world (and collected more business cards than I possibly know what to do with), complete with live music at Sky Bar, which boasts itself as Vienna’s most stylish bar with fantastic views across central Vienna. There was no lie there. The place was GEORGOUS.

It’s Thursday night and im taking it easy, catching up with work while preparing for my adventures to come tomorrow and Saturday as I explore more of this beautiful place. Stay tuned for more!