Vienna, Austria
December 29-30, 2007


Heather and I decided to spend the weekend ALONE in Vienna. Niki came over to watch the girls and we spent Saturday and Sunday in COLD Vienna. We got there early afternoon, checked into our hotel, then made our way over to the Museums Quarter on the ring. We spent a little while at the Kunst Historische Museum (the Art History Museum) and enjoyed that with peace and quiet. We obviously don't get to enjoy many of the museums of Europe because of the girls, but this was the perfect time to visit (not to mention is was SO cold outside, being inside the museum was even more enjoyable than we had predicted!).
We went to dinner at Cafe Diglas, the place we visited in Christmas 2000. It was nice to sit their and remember that trip. We also managed to walk the block from the Cafe to Zanoni's.
We then went to a musical at the Raimund Theater. "Rebbeca" is a German musical based on the book by Daphne Du Maurier. Alfred Hitchcock also did a movie based on the book. The scenery/staging was incredible, beautiful sets of the different settings of the book. The music is pretty good, although we were not familiar with it prior to seeing the show.
We woke up Sunday morning and went to church at the Vienna International Ward. It is the ward that I attended 10 years ago while I was living in Vienna. I didn't recocognize anybody from that period of time, but even then it was a relatively transient ward of embassy and expats, so I didn't anticipate anything different.
We left church and stopped at the Hundertwasser house, an apartment building designed by the Austrian architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Unlike most of the attractions in Vienna, this one was created just 20 years ago. It is, in my opinion, terribly gaudy, but interestingly enough the architect took no payment for the design declaring "it was worth it, to prevent something ugly from going up in its place"!

We planned on going to tour the Hofburg apartments but the line was surprisingly long to get in, so we visited the famous coffess house, Cafe Demel (right of Stephansplatz), walked through the Hofburg and the Volksgarten (which is absolutely wonderful in the Sping), and then drove back home.

The borders are now OPEN (like they have been for years in Western Europe) and it was SO nice to just drive right across without having to stop or to roll the dice whether their would be a long line at the border or not. We are very happy about this!
We had a great time but we missed the girls too much. We plan on going to Dublin in March and I debated buying tickets for the girls and bringing them with us, but even though it is more complicated to travel with them, it is much more fun overall than traveling without them. This was the perfect amount of time to spend time just Heather and I but then get back to the girls quickly.