Day 158: A Serendipitous Symphony

Around noon I met Tash and Kade at the nearby Café Pavlač, where we had some food and coffee.

When they left to return to their beds, I stuck around and finished some work on my computer. Around 4pm, I had a list of destinations that I would like to see and walked into old town to begin checking them off my list. Prague is absolutely stuffed with tourists, perhaps not surprising given that it was a Friday evening, though I have a feeling it's like this just about every day -- especially in the summer. I bought a Trdelník, a cylindrical donut type pastry that you can have filled with frosting or even ice cream. It wasn't bad. Extremely sweet, though.

After walking through the central mass of old town, I moved out towards the river. On the way I passed by a church that had a sign on its front door advertising a performance by, of all things, the Fort Worth Youth Orchestra.

And the performance had just started two minutes ago! I walked inside to ask about tickets, and was told the performance was free! The program they handed me was full of Tchaikovsky, Latin music, a few well-known Czech composer orchestrations, and (you won't believe this, but) a piece that featured a typewriter as a soloist.

Of course, I stayed for the whole thing. And it was one of the coolest -- if not most random -- musical experiences I've had on my trip.

Here is the first piece I saw, archetypal Czech music, Vltava by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana.

After the performance ended at 8pm it was still light outside, so I crossed a bridge to the new town area. 

An overcast day in Prague

I passed by the Franz Kafka Museum, which I decided I would definitely be going back to after seeing the weird fountain/sculpture outside and reading about Kafka later that night. There's also a neat bookstore along the main cobblestone street closest to the river. It has a lounge area downstairs so you can sit down and enjoy a book for a while before deciding to buy it. 

I was looking for a Kafka book to read, but they only had new copies available, all outside of my budget.

On the way back to the hostel I had to bum a ride off the bus because the company in charge of public transportation here makes it stupidly difficult to buy tickets. The only place to find readily available ticket machines are in metro stations (not that unusual, but you'll see why this is annoying in a moment). The ticket machines only accept coins. I'd just donated all my coins to the church where the youth orchestra performance had been, and there is no change machine, change counter, or human you can buy a ticket from. Buying a longer term ticket is a possibility to avoid having to visit a metro station with a pocket full of coins every time you want to ride the bus, but the closest options to what I need are a three-day pass and a month-long pass (which requires an I.D. to buy, another 150 CZK), neither of which are going to save you money unless you're hopping on a bus every few hours. Get your stuff together, Prague Public Transport!

Day 157: To Prague

My bus for Prague left 30 minutes later than scheduled, around 1pm and we arrived four hours later. After figuring out public transportation and moving into Hostel Marabou for the weekend, I walked into town half a kilometer and met the two kiwis, Tash and Kade, at their hostel, Brix Hostel.

I had originally thought that they were in Poland for a week, but it turns out they had gone to Prague instead. Their hostel has a bar that's open to the public, but it's essentially just hostel guests and their friends (like me) that frequent it. According to Wikitravel, prices for a half liter of beer should be around 20-35 CZK (0.8-1.5 USD !!!) but a beer at the hostel was a pretty steep 40 koruna. It's the places where beer is cheaper than bottled water that concern me at times.

The kiwis had met a group of Brits at the hostel, and they joined us later. There was a girl from Seattle staying at the hostel who joined us as well. It was nice to chat with a fellow Washingtonian and good times were had all around. Around 2 in the morning we were catching a breath of fresh air outside (at least I was -- others were there for a smoke), when it started to rain and lightning could be seen lighting up the sky. Not much later, I took advantage of a slight pause in the rain to dash back to my own hostel before things got any hairier.

Day 156: Austrian National Library and the Graves of Greats

I wanted to visit a kaffeehauser while I was here, and since the area around University of Vienna seemed ripe with interesting cafes the first thing I did was to take a metro back to that part of town. The cafe I stopped at, "Einstein", didn't have any of the special Viennese coffees I had seen listed on the internet, so I ordered an espresso machiatto with onion rings instead (a compromise between class and frugality). There is a beautiful cathedral, "Votivkirche",  nearby that I had only seen from afar yesterday. It sits in a park so it's easy to stroll around.

The architecture reminded me of Suzallo Library at the University of Washington.

While walking back through Heldenplatz on my way to the Austrian National Library, I passed through a plaza, "Michaelerplatz", that I hadn't encountered on my first pass through yesterday.

 It had some interesting buildings and sculptures.

At the National Library, the ticket lady gave me a student discount even though I didn't have my student I.D. with me (actually I did, I just forgot it was in my bag since I never use it). After ascending the central staircase, you enter a 77.7 meter long chamber densely stuffed with ornamentation and old books. I found it quite impressive and mostly tasteful.

These were my two favorite photos that I took there

In the back corner there is a Bosendorfer grand piano (Bosendorfer is an Austrian company, in fact). It must sound absolutely ethereal when played in such a large space.

That piano looks like it needs to be played 😬

The volumes on the shelves are so, literally, voluminous that you wonder what it was they had so much to write about hundreds of years ago. A few facsimiles were on display. A lot of bibles. In fact, almost everything I remember seeing had something to do with Christianity. Seems as if everyone had a god fearing fever up until the past few hundred years. Or those were seen as the only works worth preserving. There were a few old maps on display as well.

After the National Library I stopped at another cafe, this time closer to the outer ring of the Inner Stadt, where I heard there were more authentic, local cafes. The only Viennese coffee item they offered was Melange, the "most typical" Viennese coffee, similar to a cappucino but with a Viennese style "mokka" (espresso) and foamier milk. I ordered that and a sacher cake, a layered chocolate cake that I found kind of bitter. Sugar and caffeine overload!

After my "dinner". I took the metro all the way to the end of the line, then took a tram to Central Cemetery where the graves (or in some cases, supposed grave/monument) of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, among others lie.

Believe it or not, a cemetery far outside the center of Vienna was not much of a tourist attraction. It was almost entirely void of life the entire time I was there (I'm pretty sure the few bodies I saw strolling through the graveyard were among the living). The composers' graves were easy enough to find, though they were also indicated on my map, which helped quite a bit.

A church near the middle of the cemetery

I felt I needed to commemorate this moment with a selfie, although I'm still unsure how kosher grave selfies are. At least no one caught me taking pictures of myself.

Nailed it?

From the graveyard I reversed my commute back to the hostel for the night, but not before they closed all the gates to the cemetery and I had to leave via an "emergency" exit. I mean, it wasn't an emergency, I just didn't want to spend a night in a graveyard. On the tram ride back, the operator ended his route a stop earlier than I had anticipated and I pretended to understand his directives in German as he showed me and guy-with-headphones-in-his-ears out the door. I run into small obstacles such as these all the time while when traveling, so often that I usually don't even mention them in my posts. I walked the remaining half kilometer to the metro station.

I slept around 12:30am. I had already bought tomorrow's bus ticket to Prague.

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.

Day 154: To Vienna

My bus to Vienna left just before noon, so after checking out of Unity Hostel one last time I walked with a Swedish girl to the metro (she was going the same direction as me, but to the airport). The bus arrived 20 minutes late, but I wasn't in a rush. The first thing you notice upon entering Austria is the massive wind farm that surrounds you. Towering windmills stretch on in every direction for as far as the eye can see. It makes you wonder how anyone could think windmills are ugly.

Once we arrived at Erdberg Station in Vienna 2.5 hours later, I bought a Mon-Fri metro pass for 16.8 euros and took the metro about 10 stations to within a 10-minute walk of my hostel.

Google Maps is no help in this respect, because for some reason it has yet to parse the Vienna metro routes, or the company in charge of the metro hasn't made the data accessible online. After the usual check-in formalities I had to do my laundry before going out. I didn't want to have it done at Unity Hostel in Budapest because they charge 8 Euros to wash, dry, and fold your clothes for you. It turned out that the price of laundry here was 7 euros but you had to do it yourself, which just about entirely obviated my reasoning. After taking care of my laundry, I walked down the main pedestrian boulevard toward old town Vienna around 8pm. A trio of musicians were performing near the MuseumsQuartier and I stopped to listen. 

A little further downtown there is another impressive (but apparently incomplete) building and an adjacent park, where I flopped down on the grass to soak up the evening ambiance with the numerous other groups that were already there.

Once back at the hostel I realized that my key card had slipped out of my pocket at some point and I had to pay 5 euros for another one. I slept around 12.