








(Any fangirls need to make a withdrawal?)

We took a train to Vienna. I don't know if these are poppies, but they looked like it to me:

To my great surprise, nobody seemed particularly interested in Vienna. Maybe it was because we'd been to Berlin as a family a few years ago, maybe it was the unexpectedly hot weather that caught us all unprepared in terms of clothing, maybe it was how much we'd been doing (we walked a minimum of eight miles a day on this trip, every day but the last), but no one was at all jazzed for Vienna. I'd been there about twenty years ago and remembered only a very beautiful hotel facade with gilt and glass mosaics (not where I stayed, I assure you - just a place I walked by and fell in love). Anyway, we were fairly indolent in Vienna and just walked around the city center. Good to see Hercules doing some work:








After a highly disappointing trip to get Sacher torte from the Sacher Cafe (everything was abysmal except for my spice cake, which was only pretty bad), we split up, my dad and brother to rest and my mom and I to look at art. The Kunsthistorisches Museum has a few pieces by my favorite artist, Caravaggio (see the icon), so I spent some quality time with those. They've also got famous works by Parmigianino, Veronese, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Titian. The building itself is pretty splendid too. Anyway, I got the two of us back to the hotel without a map or my brother and felt tremendously accomplished. Our hotel happened to be right next to a Russian Orthodox cathedral, which looked amazing when the sun went down:


We decided we'd take a quick train to Bratislava the next morning instead of spending another day in Vienna. We ran for the train and made it by the skin of our teeth. Bratislava was quiet and pretty and honestly, nothing that we weren't getting elsewhere, but it was nice to make a change.




This same entry also appears on Dreamwidth, at http://innie-darling.dreamwidth.org/452428.html.