Austria in May- Vienna

We spent a couple of days in Vienna at the end of our visit. There was a heat wave and it was about 90 degrees so the streets and cafes were full of people enjoyign the weather. Apparently it is rarely warm enough there usually to sit outside in the evening. Vienna is full of guilded statues, the opera and horse drawn carriages. It is an easy city to visit. The sights are compact, it is a walking city, and it has a relaxed feeling.

Everywhere you went there were beautiful statues and lines of carriages waiting to take tourists around the city. The sound of hooves clattering on the cobblestone streets could be heard at all times of the day and night.

To get out of the heat one afternoon we went to the Albertina Museum. It is considered a lesser museum in Vienna but we enjoyed it quite a lot. The inside of the building was full of guilding and statues.

And it had a magnificent and strange collection of statues with "other worldly" lighting. You could walk around between these statues.

And then the cafeteria, which was ...of course beautiful and guilded.

We were walking to a park one afternoon and ran into a police line. We asked them what was going on and they told us that there was an EU summit and the French President was about to leave the building. We mostly stayed to stare at the handsome Austrian police in their oh so cool uniforms. This one was our favorite. Eventually President Sarkozy left the building with his entire army of security guards. He waved at us as he passed by.

Howard in a park looking handsome too!

And one of our favorite places we visited was the Hofburg Treasury which contains the Hapsburgs' collection of jewels, crowns and other valuables. It was absolutely unbelieveable- the wealth in one place!

Everywhere you go in Austria you are reminded of the Nazi occupation. Here is one of the statues in the Monument Against War and Fascism remembering the victims of the Nazis.

And the last night we did the white trash thing and bought a cheap ticket to the opera (standing room only) and stayed about about 40 minutes. Too hot, too crowded and too long. We're hopeless...