Vienna Day 3: Just the two of us. Gold tableware. And procrastination.

As it turns out, I’m much more interested in blogging than doing my real job, which is about to rear its ugly head and bite me in the ass. Oh well. Here’s what will likely be my final post for the working week. I know all 25 of our readers will be sitting at the edges of their seats.

The Habsburgs (based in Austria and then later Prague) ruled a ton of central/eastern Europe for several hundred years (you can read about them here), and on Monday, Jeff and I toured part of their enormous palace in Vienna, which is now broken up into a number of museums. We opted for the silver/china, Queen SiSi, and Royal Apartments package tour.

I seriously almost never get sick of seeing how the royal once lived. It seems utterly excessive, but I can’t help but wish these palaces would open a camp for adults, where you could dress in old royal garb, sleep in freezing cold canopy beds, and tinkle in a pot for a couple days. Okay, so a lot of it really wasn’t so glamorous, but it would be really cool to be transported back just for a few hours — even as a fly on one of those gilded walls.  I would, of course, also be interested in how the other 99.99999999 (“with a bar”) percent lived. I’d probably need to learn how to build a fire, but I could do it.

From the palace, we were finally able to get into the Stephansdom. Only took three tries! Fortunately, it is still a functioning church, unlike some we have toured.  It was beautiful, but I had a  hard time capturing a decent photo, even with my rad camera. I just was not feeling extremely patient.

We also walked inside the baroque St. Peter’s church. While I’m not a student of architecture, baroque to me has come to mean dripping with opulence, and also excessively … excessive. Certainly not humble, nor does it seem terribly holy to me.  Oh, well. What else would tourists do without these grand sites?

More pics from day three below!

Next, we were off to Bratislava, Slovakia.

Outside of Habsburg Palace.

Cold, bored horses.

Palace staircase.

Some insane gold tableware, Habsburg silver collection.

Habsburg gold/silver collection.

Loved this plate. Mädchen mit Hund.

Small church we visited prior to entering the palace.

Inside of small church. Even the seemingly insignificant looking churches from the outside are more impressive than anything we have in the US.

Statue outside of palace.

Inside the baroque-style St. Peter’s Church. Ridiculous.

Had some tiny sandwiches at Trzesniewski.

So good.

And tiny beers. Pinky out!

After the tiny beers, we needed to use the public toilets.

And then we finally made it to Stephansdom, with the “Tupperware-colored” windows, as Rick Steves calls them.

Inside Stephansdom. I was having trouble getting a good shot of this church. From here, we warmed up with some hot chocolate, coffee and cake. And that pretty much concludes Vienna!