Come with me if you want to live: Episode 1 of 3: Capital of Austrialand, the city of Vienna

Good daaay my good people. Back again with more tasty stories from Austria. Week or so ago we took our first trip to the capital of Austria, Vienna. Originally when I was forming my plans for my exchange studies Vienna was my second option after Graz, but it never got too far. Still we wanted to visit the capital to see what’s up in there. Before arriving in Austria, I had this image in my head that Vienna is a little like Rome that just relies of tourism and the memories of old glory and Salzburg would be a more modern city like Milan to continue with the Italy comparison. First of all, Vienna was much bigger than I thought. It is a city with over a million inhabitants and seemed like another with the tourists. I don’t think it was a special weekend or anything, still the city was crawling with tourists and that surprised us quite a bit. Makes us appreciate the relative chill of Graz. Anyway, the trip was three days and I have many stories and pictures, so I am going to split this trip into three separate posts. Hope you enjoy.

As I said we didn’t know too much about Vienna before going and doing a little bit of research. I could not name any major sight that would stand out. Vienna is full of palaces and other majestic buildings built by former emperors and other rich people with too much money. We decided beforehand that we would not go inside these buildings. There seemed to be more interesting things in Vienna and I’m not good with overly long indoor tours like museums. Even that being said - the first thing we went to was a museum called the House of Music, which is an exhibitions on the features of sound and the history of the Vienna philharmonic orchestra as well as some famous Austrian composers. There were fun modern exhibitions with interactive parts where you could conduct an orchestra in simulation and compose you own music. Definitely a different sort of museum or exhibition and totally worth the time.

You could play some notes on the stairs

The founder of the Vienna philharmonic orchestra.. i think

Some sciency maybe too siency exhibitions

Some sound room with cool lighting

Room full of different sounds

Like ordinary noices

Mozart's tour map

From the museum we did something not many people do on their holidays. We voted. There is an parliament election going on in Finland and we noticed that it just happened to be at the same time while we were in Vienna. So, we headed to the Finnish embassy and voted. I felt this was cool, not many people visit their embassies.

Finnish embassy

After voting we wondered around the centre without a real plan. We ended up walking by the local art museum and the national history museum. The buildings seemed identical and huge. In the same area we saw the Rathaus from the distance, but it was mostly covered in construction equipment with renovations. From there we headed to old town for some drinks, before heading to our Airbnb apartment. On the way we passed Neue Burg which has many different exhibitions, like papyrus museum and a globe museum. These sounded interesting, but we deemed them not worth the money plus we just didn’t have the energy for another museum tour. We also passed the Spanish Riding School where they train and perform with Lipizzan horses. Anne used to ride horses, so we were interested in the performances, but they were too expensive for our student budgets.