Biking the Blue Danube

Day 7: Saturday  June 14 2014

 Vienna certainly entertained us. First of the day was a visit to see the Spanish Riding School. We bought a 48 hour subway pass and were on our way to the Hofburg Palace Complex where the Spanish Riding School is headquartered in the Winter Riding School. First named during the Habsburg Monarchy in 1572, it is the oldest school in the world concentrating on “haute école” of classic dressage riding. The School was named for the Spanish horses that, combined with Arabian and Berber horses, formed the basis of the Lipizzaner breed, which is used exclusively at the school. We had planned to see the morning exercises, scheduled to start at 10AM, but discovered the practise sessions were only open to the public on Tuesday to Friday mornings. Our only option was to attend a performance, scheduled to start at 11 AM. We quickly bought the few remaining seats for the show.

Since we had 1½ hours to wait before the performance, we had time to explore the complex. Ray and Margaret strolled the grounds of the Hofburg Palace complex, the winter home of the powerful Habsburg Dynasty. I bought a ticket to visit the Emperial rooms decorated for the residency of Empress Elizabeth and her husband Franz Joseph I. The ticket included the huge collection of porcelain and silver collection used by the Habsburgs for their meals with their families and for formal state dinners. There were sets of dishes from Japan, China, France and Germany, nothing but the very best in the world. There were silver services enough to feed a village and gold and silver centerpieces to impress even the most jaded of tastes.

Empress Elizabeth, (AKA Sisi), was reputed to be a great beauty and became almost a cult figure in the minds of the Austrian public. Married at 16 to her cousin, Franz Joseph, she was not the happiest tenant of the Royal family. She chaffed at being micro-managed by her Mother-in-law and hated attending state occasions. To get away, she liked to travel on her own, incognito. In 1898 she traveled to Switzerland in 1898 with a maid. A newspaper got wind of her trip and published her location. It so happened that an Italian anarchist, intending to assassinate a French Duke, read the news and decided Elizabeth would be a more suitable victim. He managed to get close enough to her as she boarded a boat on Lake Geneva and stabbed her to death. The tour included a special exhibit devoted to Sisi and the palace winter residence. The family did live a privileged and sumptuous life.

It was soon time to join the others for the Spanish Riding School Performance. It was held in a sumptuous indoor room with huge chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The only hint it was built for horses was the sand and dirt covering the floor. Otherwise it looked more like a baroque Viennese ballroom. The chandeliers were raised for the performance and the youngest Lipizzaners entered with their trainers to begin the performance ( no photos allowed). Traditionally, Lipizzaners at the school have been trained and ridden wholly by men, although the Spanish Riding School states that there has never been an official ban on women. In October 2008, two women, an 18-year-old from the United Kingdom and a 21-year-old from Austria, passed the entrance exam and were accepted to train as riders at the school - the first women to do so in 436 years. The women were riding two of the young horses. The performance continued with a demonstration of dressage techniques and demonstrated the more athletic leaps and jumps for which the horses are trained. It was a most entertaining show and we, along with the entire audience, loved it.

After the horse show we had lunch in the courtyard next to the Winter Riding School where a wine festival was in progress. We chose sandwiches from a cafeteria in a large tent which offered free meals for wine merchants and reasonably priced food and wine to the likes of us. Luckily we chose a table under the tent because it poured rain while we were eating. It stopped by the time we were finished and we enjoyed sun and dry weather the rest of the day.

We wandered towards the Albertine Museum, right next to the Habsburg Complex. One of the entrances is a broad set of stairs with Dürer’s “The Hare”, one of the most famous prints of the Museum collection, superimposed on the treads of the stairs. We walked over “The Hare” to visit the museum, housed in a palace built in 1744 and expanded by Duke Albert of Sacher-Tescer as his family’s residence Albert was the husband of Empress Maria Christine, daughter of Maria Theresa, the only woman to served as Empress of Austria. Maria Christina’s younger sister was Marie Antoinette, who with her husband Louis XVI, was beheaded during the French Revolution. Maria Christina took care of official business leaving her husband to collect one of the largest and most important print collections in the world. The museum owns 65,000 drawings and approximately 1 million old master prints from Albert’s collections. The museum also includes two major collections of Impressionist and early 20th-century art, on permanent loan from private collectors as well as temporary displays of various artists. We almost “museumed out” on the sheer number of art works.

Finally we were on our way back to our hotel, but the sound of music and cheering and the sight of crowds of people near our subway station side tracked us. It was a big Gay Pride Parade with one of the main thoroughfares filled with slowly moving trucks hauling long flat bed floats decorated with balloons and the Gay Pride rainbow and full of dancing and waving participants. You had to laugh at the outrageous outfits of some of the participants who were certainly enjoying themselves.

After a well deserved rest back in our rooms we were ready for our evening’s entertainment. We took the subway to Stadt Park where we found a good Beer House for dinner where we lucky to get a table in the bar area as the whole dining room had been booked by tour groups, attending the same performance as we were in the Kursalon, just a short walk away at the edge of the park. The former mansion opened in 1860 for concerts, balls and waltzes. Strauss himself once directed his orchestra in the building. We were treated to a Strauss and Mozart extravaganza. A small orchestra played crowd pleasing selections, accompanied for several numbers by a duo of ballet dancers and a mezzo-soprano and a tenor singing opera arias, both solo and as a duo. The whole performance was very professional and deserved the standing ovations the audience gave them. We followed several of the audience members, humming tunes from the performance, to the subway station and soon found ourselves back at the hotel. What a day!

 Day 8: Sunday June 15 2014 

Marg at Schönbrunn Palace

Vienna was supposed to be two days of rest. We didn’t have much time to rest, there was too much to see and do and we barely scratched the surface.

Sunday started off with a performance of the Vienna Boy’s Choir at the 9:15AM Mass in the Hofburg Chapel. It was quite an experience for us non-Catholics. No less than six priests, one of whom was an Archbishop, performed the service, the Gregorian choir from Choral School of Hofburg Palace chanted the responses and the boy’s choir sang Mozart’s Missa Brevis, seated in the 3^rd balcony at the rear of the small chapel, accompanied by musicians from the Vienna Philharmonica. We couldn’t see the boys choir until the mass ended and the preists and Gregorian Choir left. The boy’s choir and their director came to the altar to repeat part of the Missa for us to photograph them and enjoy their music again.

Next on the agenda was a visit to Schönbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the Habsburg family. It was just a short subway ride away. There were crowds of tourist there to enjoy the summery day, but we enjoyed it anyway. The Baroque residence was built in 1695 on the grounds of an earlier hunting lodge, destroyed by the Turks, and completed in the mid-18^th C by Empress Maria Theresa to rival Versailles.

Ray, Marg and I bought tickets for a tour of 26 of the Palace rooms. The audio guide included with our ticket enabled us to move from room to room fairly quickly, except when we had to maneuver around a large tour group with their own guide. We managed. We joined Jack, whose back was not up to walked the long distances in the Palace, after our tour. A late lunch in the pleasant outdoor café rejuvenated us enough to explore some of the extensive gardens. We snapped photos of the formal gardens, the Neptune fountain, an obelisque, and a pigeon aviary with descendants of pigeons raised two hundred years ago. They local pigeons kept wanting to join the privileged ones.

We finally took the subway back to our hotel for a short rest before returning to Stephensplatz to have the best schnitzel dinner so far in very good, traditional restaurant, Fibl Müller. The restaurant has been there for eons and the reviews were right on; good food, and good, quick service, with portions more than enough for Ray and me to share one order.

Our day wasn’t quite over. Marg had been googling Wine Bars, hoping to visit one that also served dinner. We couldn’t locate one in the part of the city closest to us so we had and after dinner drink of wine at Wien & Co, also next to Stephensplatz. It was a pleasant spot, but only served appetizer plates of sliced meats and cheese to go with the wine, good for a light meal or late night stop.

We returned to our hotel for the last time on the subway. That 48 hour ticket had been well used.