6/15/14 Arrival in Vienna

On Sunday morning we met at the train station to travel to Vienna for a four day trip.

I was tired so I sat alone and listened to music most of the way since sleeping wasn't working very well.

Random landscape:

Upon arrival we took the U-Bahn to get to our nun hotel.

The Stephanushaus is part hotel, part retirement home for priests run by nuns.  The nuns are generally of an age where they should be retired themselves.  Note to self: Figure out if nuns get to retire.

Here's my room.

After settling in, Rex took us on a walking tour into the center of the city in order to get some idea of where things were.  Here's the Rochusmarkt, our U-Bahn station as well as a place to get lunch on weekdays.

This bad pun advertisement from last year was still in use.

This is the Rathaus (city hall).  

 One of my favorite parts of the Volksgarten is the rose garden near the Grillparzer memorial.  It's like a rose museum.  Each rose bush/tree has a label with the cultivar name.  Some have dedications to people who paid for a memorial rose.

The peak time for roses was about a week or so before our trip, so some of them were starting to wilt.  There were still enough to get some nice pictures.

The preferred shape of a rose varies according to the fashions of the time.  This is an example of a rose variety that would have been more popular during the baroque period, when they liked their roses to be stuffed with petals.

The Gloria Dei variety is one of my favorites.  I think they're called Peace roses in the US.

I'm thinking of turning this picture into a meme of some sort.

Left the rose museum portion of the park to find the students trying to figure out what they wanted to do that day.  

I went back to photographing roses while we waited.

In the process I flushed some pigeons.  

Got a group photo of the students.

I amused myself by photographing the baby ducks with the zoom lens for awhile.

Some of the ducklings tried to walk across the lily pads, which was extremely cute.

Once the students had photographed themselves to their satisfaction in the Volksgarten we went onward to the Heldenplatz.  There are a couple of statues of guys on horseback and the national library.  Later I visited the Prunksaal (fancy-ass room) in the library on a different day.

This is one of the museums across the street.

I already had some broad shots of the plaza from the previous year so I stuck with the zoom lens and decided to take silly pictures of horse statue butts and whatnot.

The double-headed eagle was the symbol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Today the Austrian eagle only has one head.

Another view of the Rathaus tower.

A statue on top of the library.  The clouds were dark behind the building.  Despite some threatening clouds, we had excellent weather for the whole trip.

Many more pictures to come.