We
walked back to the bus from our Venice hotel for about 30 minutes in the rain.
Then we had an 8 hour bus ride to Vienna, which wasn’t too bad because we were
going through the Italian vineyards and Austrian Alps. Everyone was studying
for the music test tomorrow and writing our papers about the concerto. It’s
nice to be back to German food, but it’s hard switching languages. I keep
thinking in Italian. On the first night in Vienna, everyone was busy studying
and finishing our papers. We had our listening test in the morning and a 4 hour
music class.
On the first day, we got a tour of
an opera house in Karlzplatz square. It was ok but not as impressive as the one
in Paris. Then we went to a little microbrewery called 1516 for lunch and tried
their sampler of Weissebier, Lager, and Black and Tan. It was a neat place, and
they liked us when we brought like 15 more guys back for dinner. After lunch,
we went to another museum with ancient instruments. This was actually pretty
impressive, I saw a bunch of old string instruments that are worth millions now
because they literally can’t reproduce the sound today that they used to make
back then. There was also an exhibit that walked you through the development of
the grand piano with a lot of diagrams of how a piano works. Dr. Hayden got on
an old harpsichord and played for a while. Then we toured some old Medieval
armor and weapons and headed back to the hotel to nap.
At night, we went back to 1516 to
watch the Germany vs. Netherlands soccer game. The place was packed and
everyone was smoking, but it was still a lot of fun. It was a great game, and
the place would erupt every time a goal was scored. So I finally got in a
little bit of the European football experience.
On the second day in Vienna, we went
to a really good painting museum in the Upper Belvedere (an old palace of one
of Austria’s rulers). They had a big garden by the palace that we ate lunch in
before going to Stephansplatz. Ryan, Jimmy, and I wandered around the massive
church in Stephansplatz for a while and went in a massive department store in
the shopping district there. Everything was really expensive though so we
didn’t buy anything. The crowded squares are pretty annoying because there are
hundreds of promoters dressed up as old composers trying to sell you concert
tickets. They are really persistent as I saw them hassling lots of groups.
Luckily we just kept our heads down and didn’t get bothered too much. After
getting a special cheese-cooked sausage in a bun for lunch, we met at a museum (Kuntzpr…something)
in the Museum Square. This was an awesome museum with about 15 works that we
learned about in class. While going to these museums, we get extra credit if we
act out scenes or statues and take a picture of it. So we did a few of those like
the Rape of the Sabine Woman with Ryan, Jimmy, and I.
We met at 8:00 that night to go to
Mozart-Saal Hall for a string quartet performance. The group was one of the top
10 string quartets in the world, so it was an awesome show. The first and last
pieces were really good, but the second was a more contemporary movement by
Debussy. It was really strange and eerie and seemed completely random, so we
didn’t like that one as much. For the encore, they played a slow dance song
that was really beautiful. I recognized the melody but couldn’t remember the
name. The hall that we saw it in was much better acoustically than the other
church, and we had pretty good seats in the balcony. After that, we went back
to the hotel and went to a famous club called the Praterdome. It was located in
what looked like the Disneyworld of Vienna but it was a lot of fun. When you
get there, you can pick between two bars (house music or black/R&B) then at
midnight the dividing wall lifted and it became one big dancefloor.
You
know you’re in Vienna when:
- There are hundreds of annoying concert promoters dressed as Mozart trying to sell tickets.
- Street performers are typically playing violins or other instruments.
- Everything is in German but no one actually likes talking about Germany.
- Going to a concert or performance is a weekly activity.
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