Vienna, The Beautiful

There's a very peculiar advantage to living in a Second World Country -- when you visit a 1+ World Country, it blows your mind!

Our first sightseeing experience in Vienna was St. Stephans' Cathedral, Austria's most eminent Gothic edifice. The first part of it was finished in the 1100s and it has been added to every since. It is spectacular.

Exterior pictures of this Gothic cathedral are below. Gothic architecture is incredibly complex and detailed and very beautiful, particularly in light of the fact that no one can afford to build like this anymore.

This is the interior left knave.

I love those arches which, it is said, are built to give one a feeling of reaching up to heaven. 
Below is a modern building just across the way from the Cathedral.

Schonbrunn Palace  

This beautiful palace is a former imperial summer residence of the Austrian royal families (not a year-round palace by any means!).  Queen Maria Theresa loved the place, and when she would come to stay she would bring her staff of 1400!  They originally fenced the area and stocked the grounds with pheasants, deer, boar and duck to give the royal family a hunting experience.  The land on which the palace stands was purchased in 1596, to give you an idea of its age.   In one of the modifications, the builders contemplated building a more beautiful palace than France's Versaille.  However, so they say, reason prevailed and they built this smaller palace of only 1441 rooms!  Below is an internet picture of the structure.

We couldn't take photos inside, but just know that everything is rococo, which means goldleaf and curley-cues everywhere!  (It does get a little much.)  In each huge room were gigantic beautiful ceramic stoves, often with guilded with gold, probably about 15 feet high.  The following picture is from the internet.

 

The picture below is of one of the extensive "side yards".

The "backyard" of the palace is unbelievable.  It stretches from here . . .

To here.  We are standing in about the middle.

Here is the fountain you can see in the middle ground in the photo above.

You'll, of course, recognize that this is King Neptune rising out of the deep.

On the beautiful grounds is the world's oldest continuous zoo, established 1752, which we didn't visit.  But we did go inside the Fern House below.

To enjoy the following . . .

This is looking up at all the fern patterns against the ceiling of the glass house.

Recognize that fella resting his feet??

And to close this portion of Vienna is a photo of a branch of the beautiful Blue Danube (which isn't blue, by the way).

Next blog:  More of Vienna . . .