High Culture to Low in Vienna

It's a little more than two hours by train from Budapest's Keleti station to Vienna, where Thom and I were meeting Chris, fresh from a conference with 127 judges.

Arguably, scenes of the chaos inside Keleti, broadcast worldwide at the height of Western Europe's immigration crisis, contributed mightily to Brexit and the continental lurch rightward.  Hungary, in fact, already has erected a fence to stop the flow of people who want to improve their lives.  Sound familiar?  Somebody better tell Trump that immigrant smugglers are using drones to evade detection when they breach the fence.

After checking in at the Austria Trend Hotel beim Theresianum (recently renovated and a real bargain) and enjoying a terrific lunch at Cafe Sperl, we toured the Upper Belvedere Schloss, or castle, a short walk away.

Imagine these gardens in bloom on a sunny spring day!

Contemporary art greets visitors.

Older work looks better in such a grand, antique setting.

I particularly liked these self-portrait busts, which some historians have interpreted as evidence of the artist's undiagnosed mental illness.  Or as I like to think, just another day when your mood can change as suddenly as the weather.

The Belvedere has one of the world's premier Klimt collections.  Photos are prohibited so I had to sneak this one.   Judith is the Old Testament widow who used feminine wiles to decapitate Holofernes, who was about to evict her (she sounds like she'd make a great addition to New York City's Rent Stabilization Board, at least in spirit).  Look closely to see her landlord's half-obscured head at the painting's lower right.

The museum offers a novel solution to selfie addiction.

Here's the terraced garden from the second floor.  It stretches down to the Lower Belvedere Schloss.  An embarrassment of riches, I'd say, but then again, Vienna was the seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The sun already had set by the time our visit ended.

We had to exit the grounds through the Lower Belvedere, still used for ceremonial occasions.

Upper Belvedere to Lower, high culture to low.  We headed for the Wiener Reisenrad on the U-Bahn.

Emperor Franz Joseph built the ferris wheel in 1897 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his reign, making it one of the world's oldest.  Although not quite as iconic as some of the structures identifying other European capitals,  Orson Welles immortalized it in The Third Man.

You can rent an entire car for a candlelight dinner or bachelor party.  We saw both.

A kitchen at the base prepares food, served in courses timed to the wheel's revolutions.

Even on a drizzly evening, the views were pretty good, especially of Prater, the amusement park below.

All roads in Vienna lead to Stephensplatz, site of the city's tallest building.  The steeple of St. Stephen's Cathedral pops up in a couple of the photos above.  Here's a daylight shot.

Glazed tiles recreate the Hapsburg dynasty's colorful coat of arms on the cathedral's roof.

Saturday night mass interfered with my photography obsession.  Sheesh! 😈

Chris calls Vienna a hoarder's closet stuffed with exquisite collections. He's got a point. There's something pretty everywhere you look, much of it unidentified.

Final stop:  cocktails at the Sky Bar on top of Steffl, a "First District" department store (it even says so on their shopping bags). Nobody but Thom could order a "porn star martini" with a straight face!