So we woke up early and hiked out to the anatomical museum, only to find it closed for the university break. Oh well.
211. Mozart fountain by the hotel.
212. Paulanerhof, on the way to the center.
213. Chicken-angel on a building.
214. Front of the opera house.
215. Along the Opernring in the early light.
216. Across the Ring, same intersection.
217. Maria Theresa in her eponymous plaza.
218. Front of the NHM.
219. Front of the KHM, worse light.
220. Austrian Parliament building.
221. Closer detail of some statues and the church-like Rathaus beyond.
222. Front view of the Rathaus over Weihnachtsmarkt.
223. Pillar and cool old houses on the Ring.
224. Church under renovation.
225. Shadows of the past.
226. Locked door of the Patho-Anatomisches. We at least made it out here, goddamnit!
227. Graffiti on a trash can, crossing back to the city center.
228. Serving two masters.
229. Another church in the city center.
230. Lippizanerhof, wide view.
231. Closeup on the dome.
232. And we didn't go in. Diese Reise, wie auch das Leben, iss gar kein Ponyhof!
233. Joseph II in front of another palace.
234. Down the pedestrian street away from the Stephansdom.
235. Stephansdom, quartered out.
236. Full view of the church and decorated scaffolding.
237. Line of horse-drawn carriages with emissions-control systems.
238. Side tower on the cathedral.
239. Orthodox church closer to the Donau.
240. View downriver.
241. Modern architecture across the Schwedenbrücke.
242. More of the same.
243. A look along upriver.
244. Graffiti under the bank.
245. Cool street view off the river towards the center.
246. Modern building across the canal.
247. Pedestrian and subway bridge across the canal, in horrible light.
248. Equestrian statue from across the ring; light could be better, but it's winter.
249. "Star metal"; meteorite slices in the NHM.
It was too dark inside the Venus of Willendorf exhibit to take pictures, but it was still really cool to see. There is a lot of other cool stuff here, but M is bored clean out of his skull, an unfortunate consequence of him not having any contending plans. "Walk around and look at stuff" is not an objective: we can do that between objectives.
The museum nearly finished (i.e., all that I could get away with), we went on back to get lunch.
250. Neat fade-out of steps at Karlsplatz.
251. Cool modernistic apartment block over the pizzeria we did lunch at.
252. After lunch; awesome sky as we go back to the hotel and regroup.
So we headed out to the Zentralfriedhof, which isn't that Zentral, actually, being way out past the end of the U3 at Semmering. We misjudged the distance from that stop and hiked out from the U-bahn rather than picking up the S6, which made for an interesting hike.
253. Send this to any horsey types among your friends. They will like it at first, then recoil in horror.
We did not get a snack here. I wasn't hungry, and M doesn't eat Leberkäse.
254. Sind wir nicht alle? Some irony that didn't come out before enhancement; this whole place is for the disposal of "biological waste".
255. Central memorial church, backlit.
256. The Mozart memorial, flanked by other great composers.
257. Beethoven's monument.
258. The grave of Franz Schubert.
259. Hic requiescat J. Brahms.
260. Strauss, the last of the composers in this corner.
261. Pillar at the exit, lit from the west.
After getting back to the city center, we hiked around looking for a cafe, and ended up at a former satellite house of the famous Julius Meinl. It's rare that you wait 20 years for something and find it better than anticipated, but Sachertorte did work that way. It is hard to argue that this is not the best cake in the world; if you also encountered this in a sidebar in your German I text and have been wondering, yes, it is worth coming out to Vienna for.
12/9 - Vienna
After a very long hike, we finally found the military museum, very much a "cahn't git thay-uh from hi-yuh" proposition. It was a good hike, and it ended up being a highly interesting collection, even for M to some degree.
262. Cool urbanscape on the hike in.
263. Finally back inside the city limits. Getting from the U-bahn to the museum involved walking completely around the arsenal complex and a bunch of abutting sprawling commercial complexes, crossing under the A23 twice, and in the process exiting and re-entering Vienna proper.
264. Cannons outside the museum.
265. Panorama of the military museum courtyard. The building is really long and thin, which makes for easy encapsulation of the halls.
266. Detail of the central hall.
267. Saab parked over by the side.
- World War I hall -
268. Selection of pre-war pistols.
269. Cross-section of a Mannlicher type 1895.
270. Models including a 1911 tank design (never built).
271. Alpine gear of "the enemy". My Italian great-grandfather fought against the Austrians in the Alpine campaign; hence the adversarial references here.
272. Mountain artillery; in the alpine campaign, both sides man-packed guns like this up the mountains to shoot peak-to-peak at each other.
273. Equipment and mugshots of the men who killed Europe to save Serbia.
274. Franz Ferdinand's blood-soaked, doctor-slashed jacket.
275. The car.
276. Bullet hole in the rear panel, either a miss or the shot that killed Sophie.
277. Wartime rationing posters.
278. The enemy sells war bonds too.
279. Instruments built by Russian POWs.
280. Canvas from the Alpine campaign.
281. When flashlights haven't been invented/made it over to you yet, here's how to march by night.
282. Captured Russian rifles with their absurdly long bayonets.
283. P96 because I'm a Jin-Roh nerd.
284. Montenegrin revolvers.
285. Turkish Lewis gun; such sick ironies of the international arms trade fed pacifist movements between the wars. For those who are not historical weapons nuts in their spare time, the Lewis gun is an American design mostly used in the first World War by Allied forces; that the Turks had them meant that the Ottoman soldiers on the heights and the diggers down in the sand at Gallipoli were shooting at each other with the same exact weapons.
286. Italian bergsagliere gear.
287. Photos from the front.
288. Another mountain gun, this one still with breech block.
289. Elephantine mortar dominates this hall.
290. "War junk", literally. A good enough end for it.
291. Nailbats and other trench weaponry, including a shield that was obviously less useful than its bearer hoped.
292. Shells with stool for scale.
293. Forest of muzzle tubes.
294. Shell casings by a window.
295. More sample shells.
296. Air-powered mine thrower and compressed-air cylinders.
297. Scrap metal collected for the war effort.
298. Iron bunker showing shell damage.
299. Another view of the giant gun, with little kid in the frame for scale.
300. American trench weaponry.
301. Breech of the mortar.
302. Helmets with improvised over-plates.
303. Primitive antiaircraft mount, on a post and cartwheel for 360-degree traverse.
304. Primitive truck wheel. The "tires" are two layers of metal separated by wooden blocks.
- World War II hall -
305. Hyperinflation hit Austria as well.
306. Paraphrenalia of the National Front.
307. Anti-communist propaganda.
308. Barricade and propaganda posters. Austria fought two poorly-concluded civil wars between 1930 and 1938 that laid the foundation for the Anschluss; stripped of territory and riven by political violence, a critical minority were willing to go along with the whole "giving up on being an independent country" thing, even if they weren't crazy about the Nazis.
309. Election posters from various parties.
310. Anti-semitic poster of the Christian Socialist party.
311. Opposing Anschluss.
312. And in favor.
313. Hitler relics post-takeover.
314. Entfernt. Hitler, as always concerned about his place in history, had himself added in among the emperors and great generals in the lower entrance hall of this museum immediately after Anschluss; the curators removed the bust as soon, in 1945, as the Red Army could make possible.
315. Negative space. The residents of indicated cities outside the Reich can be forgiven for, on seeing something like this, thinking themselves on a checklist.
316. More
317. Tracked motorcycle/hauler.
318. Detritus of Stalingrad.
319. Damaged tail of a B-24.
320. British incendiary bomb.
321. Desperate for good news.
322. "Der Schreibtisch-täter" -- I'm translating this as "The Criminal at His Desk", but the original is a lot more clear about the writing desk being the weapon and method of agency in the crime.
323. Leaflets bombed out in advance of the Red Army.
324. German assault rifle and Panzerfaust.
- navy of a pretty much landlocked nation exhibit -
325. The terrifying power of naval gunnery. Eight inches of armor plate, done through like a hole punch.
Upstairs!
326. Inside the upper hall.
327. Another view of the ceiling. This, let alone the car and jacket, makes the hike worth it.
328. Back from an exhibition corridor.
- Establishment of the national army and wars against the Turks -
329. Arquebuses - exactly as unwieldy as the rules say they are. Absent explicit post-Renaissance technology levels, I am never allowing any mods to the arquebus performance stats in any game that I ref. Just look at these things. This is where the technology actually was, at a place where you would need to be mildly insane to want to use one of these from anything but a fortified position, let alone carry it into the field.
330. Volley gun and the equipment it was trying to obsolete.
331. Captured Ottoman banners.
332. Turkish muskets, not quite jezail-form.
333. More captured Turkish hardware.
334. Breaking the siege of Vienna.
335. Armor piercer; the physics are solid, but this needle-thin, five-foot-long blade is almost the direct opposite of "wieldy".
336. Turkish hunting rifles adapted from earlier military pieces.
337. Jezails captured at Belgrade.
- Napoleon to the Austro-Prussian war -
338. Prussian accessories.
339. A collection of bayonets.
340. Inside a Turkish field tent.
341. Repeating airgun and part of the machine needed to charge its cylinders.
342. Apt damage to figures from a memorial garden.
343. Model of the museum and arsenal at the time Radetzky built it.
344. Why Austria lost the Austro-Prussian War; the only breech-loader in this entire case of contemporary arms.
345. Leavings of the first and last emperor of Mexico.
346. And why Prussia won: the giant, idiot-proof bolt handles of the needle-guns proclaim efficiency, standardization, modernity.
We then took a nice lunch at the restaurant in Objekt 1, and, finding the S-bahn connections unfriendly, hiked the rest of the way back to the hotel.
347. Courtyard face of Objekt 1.
348. Back in the city center; Russian war memorial.
349. Closeup of the soldier atop the pillar.
350. Fountain in front of the memorial.
351. "Morning Line", a sculpture installation in the same square.
352. Across to the Schönberg-Institut.
353. Another angle of the Russian soldier.
354. Cool building crossing back towards Karlsplatz.
355. Detail of the vignettes on the corners.
So we're at dinner waiting to get told we need to clear out in the morning (my screwup this time). We're in a Uighur restaurant, probably the only one between New York (because New York has one of every kind of restaurant) and Urumqi, and zero of the four total customers of are Viennese (I make it three Amis and one Hong Kongese). So geht es die Welt.
356. The imperial industrial ministry lit up at night.
Shishlak is on the menu, but wur no gettin it: M because it's likely to actually be meat, me because this place is far too sanitary. If you don't need to clean it out with your carry knife/AK47 bayonet, it's not real shishlak.
357. Lagnam and somen. Verdict: excellent, but the hot sauce does not fuckin play. Underestimate Central Asian foods at your peril.
Universe? FUCKING DEKED. As far as I can tell, we're out on the 11th, not tomorrow. Tonight is writing and umbuchen, tomorrow is Naschmarkt, Georgian food, the hope of not getting bags bagged, beercaps, and El Clásico. I still hope for the worst, but the possiblity of the sun shining through it still there.
12/10 - Vienna
The shadow of a chuckie oot still hangs over us, but the likelihood of avoiding it goes up and up each time we pass the front desk and are not called to account. It's somewhat of the essence of being in Metternich's old depredations to live in fear of the knock at the door.
The Naschmarkt was awesome; maybe a video later, but my camera doesn't do smell, and the sound isn't that great. All of the Hapsburg empire, from Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, and farther east, the Czech and the Balkans, shows up packing gourmet food and junky household accessories, in a babel of tongues and a swirl of costumes ancient and modern. "The flotsam of empire" has seldom found more apt a Stichpunkt.
358. 1. Wiener TV, on the way to the market.
359. Face of the carpenters' hall, coming back.
We are currently trying to find a phantom Georgian restaurant, because if that doesn't work, we're down to grabbing some snacks and (more) beers from the supermarket and killing time adding to the cap collection while we wait for El Clásico. Celtic has an afternoon kickoff, but with no internet, I won't be able to check that till Munich.
The Georgian place turned out to be right next to the hotel. And closed. On to the Naschmarkt!
video7: So im Naschmarkt. I was looking for a better view, but was hurting on battery.
360. The Secession gallery at the Karlsplatz end.
361. Naschmarkter Mittag. Fresh ingredients, a knife, a table, and some punch: all you need. Substitute, of course, beer in warmer weather.
362. Rote Wien im Effekt.
As long as we don't get tossed between now and 2, we should be ok. Plan is to hang oot, drink beer, and eventually get dinner before the game, but lunch was damn huge -- and I have still an unexpected amount of wild boar salami to last the rest of the trip.
3-4-3 vs 4-2-3-1. This will be decided by the midfield battle, and then by Puyol vs Higuaín. If Inestia and Xavi can't handle Özil, Khedira, and Alonso, it's over -- likewise if Puyol needs help on Higuaín. Pep must really trust his offense if he's setting out like this (he wasn't actually, but that just shows how smart Sky is at predicting lineups) -- otherwise, it's really looking like Real will take the gap to six. (Hooray reverse jinx!)
363. Karlskirche by night.
364. From the foot of the church.
My first-scorer bet, had I placed it and identified Benzema (who started) rather than Higuaín (who didn't) as the ponta de lança, would have been correct, but precious little else as Barca of course went on to win 1-3. Packed house, gute Stimmung, exactly what you want for El Clásico.
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