8th Day of Honeymoon: Vienna (5/30)

  Vienna gave us a cold and rainy morning on our second day there, with temperatures in the low 50s. Nevertheless, we stubbornly headed out to a pre-paid walking tour of the city for 10 A.M. Our guide was friendly, but she told us that that day was Corpus Christi, a church-related holiday, which she cheekily referred to as "Happy Cadaver Day." What this meant was that nationalist youth groups marched while most of the shops were closed, although most museums and restaurants were open.
   On the tour, we learned about the city's architecture (Baroque, Neoclassical), its current corrupt politics, its generous welfare system, its national weight loss incentives, and its ridiculously low average salary (around $15,000). To our guide, this meant the city was wonderful; however, she did not shirk away from Vienna's history, particularly the post-WWI era, when Hitler lived there and experienced mass poverty, which he attributed to the Jewish elite. She also pointed out a Holocaust memorial that the city did not erect until the 21st century, sights around the Ringstrasse, and the Hofburg palace from a different angle. But after awhile, the rain and cold picked up, so Aleks and I dropped off from the tour.

   With the weather as awful as it was, we decided to view the National Historical Museum, where we were able to take photos of famous paintings by Brueghel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Caravaggio. This was one of the better ideas we had in Vienna. Unfortunately, we did not have time to visit the Freud Museum, the contemporary museum with the various Klimts, or the Schonbrunn Palace. With the increasingly cold weather, we headed back to the area near our hotel, where we got some surprisingly tasty pizza and beer, and then burrowed back to our warm hotel. At this point we were more than ready to leave cold, expensive Vienna for Prague.