Day 8: Vienna by day

Despite our "workout" last evening, we were pretty chipper this morning as we headed out to re-visit all of the places we'd scoped out last night. Map in hand, we walked into town for our first stop: St. Stephen's Cathedral.



We took our time getting into the city center, stopping a few times along the way to look at things that interested us, including the giant soccer ball and cleats for the Euro2008 stuff. One other interesting stop was the Plague Memorial set up by King Ferdinand II. I very much enjoyed the carvings of people dying of the plague, and of course the extremely large jaw of the King (apparently a birth defect as a result of massive in-breeding), who was shown kneeling in thanks midway up the monument for having his life spared.



PS. The Plague is GROSS, but I'm loving it. I did do a few papers on the topic in college, and it was fun to see some of the history of it for myself.

This especially was true as we toured the crypts of the cathedral, during which we saw the mass grave created during the plague. There was a hole drilled up to the street where people could just drop their dead bodies into the deep crypt below the church. Since it started filling up quickly, they had prisoners in the crypts full-time, raking the bodies into piles, and then- once suitably decomposed- pulling the flesh off the bones so that they could "stack them like firewood," according to the guides.

Lovely.

After the cathedral, we walked around for a while and decided to split up, Clay and I in search of the medical history museum (more plague stuff, yay!) and Rachel to check out the opera. On the way we had a brilliant lunch of all you can eat sushi and mongolian BBQ- SO good.

Sadly, after quite a hike through a random part of town the university, we arrived at the door of the medical museum to see that it was only open on Wednesdays and Thursday mornings, despite our brochure saying "everyday, from 9am-6pm."BIG let down. Maybe next time.

We sat around the grass of the campus for a little while before heading back to meet Rachel at the Fine Arts Museum around 3:30pm.

The museum was cool- lots of great paintings, some of the highlights (well, for me anyway) were the huge Rubens, Caravaggio, and Archibold paintings, although there were lots of cool antiquities as well.

After a few hours we headed home to rest to get our strength for an evening in the "Fan Zone"- supposed to be out of control tonight since Austria is playing Poland in Vienna. Sadly, after making our way through the crowds on the subway and to the gates, they had shut it down for the evening, not letting anyone else in.



To be honest, we were all kind of tired, so it wasn't the end of the world. At least we "saw" it, even if from the outside of the fence.

Off to bed- still a few more things to see tomorrow, including the grounds of the palaces, and maybe another museum or two before catching an evening train to... BUDAPEST!!