Graduation Trip Day 1: Vienna, Austria

July 25, 2013

The first thing we saw in Vienna:  the town hall. All of the windows have flowers. It was lovely—flower petals covered the ground underneath and they were all red and beautiful.  Jeff had researched a little, and he said that they play free movies there at night sometimes, and so there were tons of rows of chairs and a huge screen in front of the cathedral. 

We passed Austria's parliament building which is really cool.

Next, we went to the Heldenplatz, or the big public square, a few blocks away. The museum there is Hofburg Palace. 

Hitler gave a speech here in front of hundreds of thousands of people. He gave it from the balcony, and you can see the cathedral we saw at the beginning, and a statue of a horse in the middle of the square with people climbing all over it. 

This is where he announced the annexation of Austria and Germany on 15 March 1938. We walked all around where all of these people stood, cheered, and listened.

Here's that same horse and cathedral that you see in the picture above

Tunnel

We walked under a small tunnel into a square where there were some Roman ruins, carriages and horses, old apartments where Josef Hayden lived, and a weird statue guy holding a violin that would play an awesome song when you put coins in the box in front of him.

Roman Ruins

I'm watching the guy on the violin play while everyone else is checking out the coins that have been tossed into the ruins

We were going to go into the Treasury museum, but it would’ve been around $50. We just looked through all the books and pictures that were being sold in the tourist shop There were crown jewels, clothing, the baby bassinette for the “royal highness,” and things like that.

The Spanish Riding School was doing a show that afternoon. They were pretty expensive, but we got a shot of the arena. They have their horses do crazy cool jumps and tricks (they had pictures and videos all around). It would’ve been awesome to see. I also wanted to go to a concert here—they were playing Mozart, Vivaldi, etc. But they were expensive, too, and we had so many other free things to see! I do want to see a concert like that another time. We went to one during my first Europe trip for BYU—Idaho. I loved it so much I want to do it again. 

Jeff: After we walked around Vienna in the morning, we walked through the garden above and back to our car. My plan was to leave Vienna a little past noon, so we could make it to our next stop.