Monday, Monday
Monday, January 7, 2013 at 12:19PM (can you read those words without humming ?)
Looking outside this morning, we feared there might be snow, but fortunately, it was still raining.
My focus was a little closer, though; the last hotel breakfast for a while. We sat planning our day over boiled eggs and Birchermuesli watching as the rain turned to a drizzly kind of sleet. Fortunately, by the time we’d packed our bags, negotiated a late checkout (“What time would you like, Mr Thomas?”, “Well, we don’t need to leave until four”. “Then four o’clock will be fine”), the rain/drizzle/sleet had stopped enough for me to take an umbrella out with me but not to put it up.
A rather different city greeted us this morning though. The Christmas decorations in the Kärntner Straße were being taken down and there were several of these elevator platforms here and there making a pretty swift job of it, too.
It was delivery day, clean up day…back to work day.
We were heading for the Haus Der Musik, in one of the side streets, where we planned to spend a couple of hours before doing a little light shopping and so on before our flight home.
It was an excellent choice! As well as the usual museum-type collections of memorabilia (those are Brahms’ spectacles!), there was lots of interaction.
We composed waltzes which were played back to us and for which we could have ordered a partiture (but we didn’t). We learned a great deal about the science of music and hearing and enjoyed fiddling with touchscreens and twiddling knobs (no children here on a weekday morning to get in the way!)
We even got to conduct the Wiener Philharmonic! Not that they were taking a blind bit of notice of me…
I admired a display of little dance cards from one of the grand balls and enjoyed the morning very much indeed. We left humming and with a spring in our step. It had been a good choice!
So, back into the city, past these gorgeous caryatids (there appear to be so many in Vienna!) in Josefplatz, where we meandered around, eyes gazing upwards at the lovely buildings and the rooftop figures too.
So this sight came as a little surprise!
The stables of the Spanish Riding School were just there to our right but we’d been so busy looking to our left, we failed to notice. (A pantomime audience would have been screaming “behind you!” by now) A handful of the grey Lipizzaner horses were taking the morning air and looking very graceful indeed.
We were more in need of some refreshment however, so “drei heisse Schokolade, zwei mit schlag und einmal ohne” in Julius Meinl was an excellent idea.
Making our way back to the hotel via Kärntner Straße again, instead of peering into shop windows, I glanced the other way and noticed a beautiful decoration on the wall opposite – how had we missed it before?
The young man and his camel were particularly cute!
(so was the warm coat I spotted in the Gerry Weber shop sale, too ;-)
With no room for any more krapfen, apfelstrudel with or without schlag, it was time for home.
The weather had dried, the sky was white and it was cold. It threatened snow and we were happy to be moving right along before it came in and created any havoc. The taxi whisked us to the airport in no time at all and after a very full flight home, our little jaunt was done.
Good to be home, as always!
Austria in fun, going out, music, travelling
Reader Comments (2)
Welcome home from another fabulous trip.
Sounds just right. You obviously have these little long weekend jaunts down, but where we might think we were way cool for going the 100 miles to New York City for the weekend, you cross borders -- and continents even.
The white Christmas lights are still up on Rittenhouse Square. I wish they would leave them up all year and just add some colored ones for the holidays. February will be bleak (except for our two week trip to Hawaii, so I'd best stop complaining.)