Gruss Gott!

We have arrived in Austria in good shape. The Vienna metros are clean and the city is safe and beautiful. Yesterday we got a good view of St. Stephen's Cathedral. It's huge and hard to get in just one camera shot. Following that we visited the MUMOK Art gallery in the Museumsquartier. We got a discounted fee as they were rennovating three of the floors...cha ching! The top floor was dedicated to Avantgarde art with pieces from Kadinsky, Rodinchenko, Paul Klee and others. They had a neat booth that showed film art. We saw Man Ray's La Retour a la Raison (pictures of nails up close and fast) and Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (fun pinwheels played on a gramophone). Both were silent, artistic, and psychedelic. The second floor had works focused on the theme of anti-capitalism and consumerism...Andy Worhol, Yoko Ono. The bottom floor scared the living daylights out of us. Babies, sex, films about people bleeding...you get the picture.

In the afternoon we toured Schonbrunn, the get-away palace of the Hapsburgs. The highlights were seeing the awesome gardens behind the palace (we both thought it looked a lot nicer than Versailles) and Franz Joseph's toilet (a relatively new invention for him).

Today we walked around downtown Vienna, saw the Hofburg Palace, the treasury, and the Belvedere. The Hofburg Palace is an impressive complex. As we are on a budget, we only visited the treasury (IRONY?). There we saw several royal robes woven with silk and gold, crowns studded with jewels, the baby cradle of Napoleon's son, and more sceptres than you could imagine. The Belvedere houses the world's largest collection of Gustav Klimt's works. We were both impressed with how much The Kiss, his most famous work, is really shiny. Other works, too many to name here, by Austrian artists were neat too.

All in all, we have really enjoyed Vienna. People are kind, prices are reasonable, and the city is beautiful. Tomorrow we're off to Salzburg.