Day 155: Inner Stadt

I only had two full days in Vienna, so I was pretty motivated to see as much as I could. I took the metro back to Museumsquartier Station, which was just about as far as I had gone yesterday. I first checked the park for my lost key card, with no success. I then explored a building complex and plaza known as Heldenplatz.

This is where the VIPs of yestercentury would spend their days. There is an ancient instrument musuem and the old court library in the area, but today happened to be one of the five or so days a year they are closed, so I bookmarked them for tomorrow.

A smaller square near the main plaza

From Heldenplatz I walked into Volksgarten, an extremely pleasent garden area with fountains, statues, and hundreds of rose plants.

Needless to say, it's a great place to just be -- smelling the scents and sitting in the shade by a fountain. 

One fountain shoots out of a fish's mouth, another shoots out of a man's mouth

Inside the above building is this sculpture by a contemporary American sculptor

Tanning with a view

From Volksgarten I stumbled into the University of Vienna, which seems to be located entirely in a single, large building that takes up a square city block. I thought there would be a cool reading room inside, but most of the doors were closed and everything was labeled in German so I was too afraid to try the door handles.

After stopping at a cafe closer towards the center of the city, I found St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Surprisingly, there is a free entrance area that allows you to see most of the interior of the church. Throughout the 20th century, the facade of the cathedral became increasingly blackened by the pollution from nearby factories and vehicles. Some sections have yet to be cleaned. The look is not very flattering.

I hopped on the metro for a stop to Stadtpark. North of the park there is the Museum of Applied Arts which usually has a 10 Euro cover charge, but specifically on Tuesdays, from 6-10pm it is free. It was only 4pm at that point, so I went back to the hostel to make myself nuttella and jelly sandwiches for dinner and to rest. At 7pm I took the metro back to the museum.

Among a lot of old furniture and ceramics, the museum has a lot of items that would probably fall into the industrial design genre. Things like book covers, posters, rugs, household tools, etc. I thought they had some exhibits on the "singularity", which I had seen in one of their brochures and had been my primary motivating reason to come back, but they were nowhere to be found. 

Looking up the central staircase at the musuem

I left around 9pm and went back to the hostel for the night.