Eurotrip 2013, Day 7: Vienna

Big sightseeing day in Vienna today. Quick hits.

First up, more churches. Stephansdom (St. Stephan's Cathedral) is a big tourist draw in the very center of Vienna. IMO, not as cool as St. Vitus in Prague, but it has a cool roof:







Just down the street and not mentioned in any tourist guides is St. Peter's, which I think is actually quite a bit more impressive and attractive. It also happens to be a working church:



From there I headed down towards the National Library, and on the way saw a (pretty badly out of time) marching band performing outside the Habsburg Apartments, the former imperial residence.




My goal at the library was to see the Globe Museum. It turned out to actually be housed in a separate building a few minutes away, but was totally worth the hunt. Unlike the DOX museum in Prague, the Globe Museum had a well-curated collection with detailed descriptions and information about the exhibit. It ranged from the earliest globes of the Renaissance to modern digital globes; one of the coolest exhibits is an interactive touchscreen which lets you spin a virtual high-res scan of an ancient globe and contrast it with modern maps to see where we've corrected things. It's pretty neat to see the map of the world evolve over time from ones completely missing the Americas, to ones with California as a separate island, and ones with Australia and Antarctica connected.


No Americas!

Downstairs in the same building as the globe museum was the national library's Esperanto museum. Clearly curated by a lover of the language, the museum walks you through the history and ongoing use of the language, with audio samples throughout. Probably the most interesting thing was the handful of propaganda pieces written in Esperanto:



One thing was very clear after seeing the museum and the language (particularly after coming from Prague and seeing Czech): Esperanto was clearly a European's notion of a universal synthetic language. It basically looks like a bastardized Romance language with a bit of Slavic structure and vocabulary thrown in. At least in the small sample shown, there was nothing to suggest roots even in the more distant Indo-European languages, let alone something from a completely different language family (Finnish, Japanese, Chinese). While it makes sense in historical context (Esperanto was created in the aftermath of World War I, which at its core started as a European conflict), even by World War II it would have been obvious thanks to the Pacific theater that a European linguistic utopia would not be universal. Add that to the list of reasons Esperanto never took off.

After the two museums, it was time for a late lunch at the Naschmarkt, a giant open-air market running down the middle of two large avenues. The aisle on the right has sit-down restaurants, and the one on the left has stalls and stands. At its beginning (inner) end, it's dominated by fancy restaurants and stalls, which give way to falafel and döner stands, dried fruit stands, and finally a long narrow flea market at the western end. Lunch consisted of a (very greasy and sort of bland) Russian pastry with a lamb patty, and a really delicious soup from a local vegetarian restaurant. The flea market had a little bit of everything: weird teddy bears, kaleidoscopes from Geneva, ancient record players, bathroom hardware, you name it.

The globe museum ticket also includes entrance to the Esperanto museum and to a papyrus museum in the main building of the national library. After lunch, there was just enough time to catch the papyrus museum ten minutes before closing. They had papyruses in lots of languages: Latin, Arabic, hieroglyphic:




Dinner was at a restaurant called Vapiano: like Pluto's, you get the dishes you want from each station and pay up at the end. Unlike Pluto's, it's Italian and your tab gets marked up using a little RFID card you get at the front, rather than a punchcard. Nothing to write home about, but a nice solid simple Italian meal to get the blood sugar going again.

The evening's entertainment was a performance of Mozart's Requiem in the third church of the day, the Karlskirche or St. Charles' Church. This was the most impressive church yet, especially in concert ambiance and with the nighttime reflection in the pool. The music itself was fun, though I found myself wishing I'd remembered to buy the program -- I enjoyed the bits of the Requiem to which I knew the words much better than the rest, because then I was able to focus on the texture of the music rather than trying to decipher its content.








Remember the Soviet soldiers' memorial from yesterday? On the walk back home from Karlsplatz I learned that the fountain lights up with a dazzling variety of colors. If anything, this picture isn't vivid enough to reflect reality: