Vienna

12-13 Oct

vienna_train.jpg (9039 bytes) We went to Vienna this weekend. That’s Wien to them, Viden to the Czechs. It was great! We had a train compartment all to ourselves, on the way there and back. We took a night car there so we slept the whole time. Both trains were practically empty. Daniel tried to wake me up to see Vienna as we pulled in at 6 am, but I was pretty tired.

The first place we went, after locking up our stuff, was to St. Stephan’s Cathedral, which was quite impressive and especially neat because they were holding a mass there. I mean, it was neat that here was, probably, one of the most historic churches in Austria, directly in the center of Vienna (which is built in concentric circles) and people who wanted to worship there still could. It was a little eerie though, I must add, because there were microphones all throughout the place so that you could hear the mass, and especially when all 6 priests chanted together, it was quite unreal sounding. There was this great banister on a winding staircase leading up to what Daniel told me was the baptism thing (I think that’s what he said). At the bottom of the banister there was a blob and it evolves into a frog and further into some salamander type things and at the top is a dog, but I don’t know if they became the dog, or if it’s just there because I couldn’t see that high and you can’t go up the stairs.

A million kids were out collecting money for the church and, after a few times, one told us, "Do you have some sticker? If you give money, you get one and no one else will ask you!" Here’s my sticker. sticker.jpg (5584 bytes)