Viena 4

Happy New Year Vienna! The weather is always the same - cold and windy! But we are weather proof and we don’t want to skip many things from our original plan, so we go metro hop on hop off and we can see a lot of the majestic buildings around the metropolis. The Golden Cabbage - the Secession and its nearby market, the Musikverin, where the famous new year concert was happening, the Museumsquartier where we had been the previous evening, now could be seen on daylight, the Karlskirche, the Votivkirche - a neo-Gothic church and the Minoritenkirche where there is a life-sized copy of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper on the church's northern wall. It is a mosaic made by the Roman mosaic artist Giacomo Raffaelli, commissioned by Napoleon I in 1809, but it was not finished before Napoleon's abdication. Francis II of Austria bought it, wanting to install it in the Belvedere in Vienna. As it was too large for the building, it was set up on the north wall of the church, where it remains to this day. The mosaic is 9.18 x 4.47 m and weighs approximatively 20 tons.
Before going to the opera we still had time to visit the Wurstelprater, an amusement park and section of the Wiener Prater (a park) in the second district of Vienna, Leopoldstadt. This institution dates back to the time of the Austrian Empire, when Emperor Joseph II made the Prater (which has been serving as Imperial hunting ground until then) open to public in 1766. Soon the first snack bars, stalls and bowling alleys opened up on the grounds and the Wurstelprater was born. The best-known attraction is the Wiener Riesenrad, a giant Ferris wheel. With a weight of more than 240 tons and a height of roughly 65 m the Giant Ferris Wheel looms over the Prater in Vienna since 1897.
The UNO city is normally the landscape for the Vienna marathon starting point. It is here that the skyline has some skyscrapers that are lined along the Danube.
The Bat - Johann Strauss Opera - was hilarious and the cherry on top of the cake for these short holidays! The atmosphere, the performance and the music gave us three hours of pure entertainment! Surely something special to repeat! End of the day in the Bermuda Triangle- called like so because many people who go to this area tend to forget where they were during their passage because of the great amounts of alcohol that one can drink in this area.
As the following day was only for travelling back home, this was the end of the journey!

Only one more thing... Thomas, our Airbnb host was a character who prepared really nice breakfasts, was very enthusiastic about having people around... especially Wolfgang... and maybe the only person that I have met who says: I really love housekeeping!!!Read more