walking

guten tag, damen und herren!

today i visited the belvedere galerie, which i'll talk a lot more about tomorrow (i'm going again...i wanted to get an overview today). i'm really exhausted right now, for some reason. i'm about to go grab some dinner and then head to bed EARLY. vienna is tiring! but so amazing...the city just keeps opening up. 

so i thought i'd save the "artistic" observations for tomorrow and just kinda ramble about my personal trip here, which is what i want to talk about. and it is my blog after all, so i get to say whatever i want. ;)

my feet hurt! i swear to god, i have never felt ANYTHING like this, EVER. i mean, it won't go away! i walk everywhere...i've developed this charming little limp that i'm sure enchants everyone around me. but i traipsed around the city again today. it's amazing, all these landmarks that are kind of in the back of my mind to seek out, and i stop to get some coffee and turn around and bam! hello, secession pavilion! hello, karlskirche! hello, stefansdom! 

i went to cafe central again today because it has airconditioning (i thought it was strange that they had that literally engraved on their front door, but trust me, when i was melting after my visit to the belvedere gardens, it was absolutely the first place i thought of). i really like it there...it's a little more expensive than i would like, but now i've learned the things to avoid (like eiskaffee, which is upwards of 5 Euros and absolutely disgusting, and bottled water (which is usually at least 3 Euros)). i had a "sommerspritzer" this afternoon, which is white wine, club soda, and sliced limes....perfect after a day sweating my way through like 3 museums (the belvedere is a compound of musuems, really), and then espresso (they don't have "coffee" as we know it. "kaffee" is espresso....a "melange" is a latte, etc). cafe central is large and roomy and beautiful, but it has a feeling of a small-town coffeeshop, even then. i like it! too bad it's kinda out of my way.

then i decided to wander in the immediate area, which i hadn't explored yet. it turned out this was stephansplatz, a huge market-type area, lined with boutiques, and there were buskers, painters, rappers, dancers, mimes, and musicians drawing crowds everywhere. apparently it's a big thing in vienna in the summer to send people out in 18th century costume to sell tickets to classical concerts at major venues like the staatsoper, stephansdom, and karlskirche. when i turned down the guy who tried to sell me a ticket today, we ended up having a rather long conversation about van cliburn and tschaikovsky's 1st piano concerto...i told him i was studying schönberg and mahler and then we talked about das lied von der erde for a while...he seemed very surprised that i actually knew what i was talking about, and we ending up chatting for a while. it turns out he is a violinist in the "best of mozart" thing they were doing that night at stephansdom. he understood when i turned it down. ;)

so basically, that's why vienna's amazing. just by turning around i discover something that excites me so much. i wandered into a store today that sold ONLY classical cds. i mean, packed, floor to ceiling, with thousands of them. ahhhh......