Last Thursday, there was a trip planned to go to the Antonin Dvorak Museum. Since it was free, I decided to go just because. I didn't know who that guy was, but I figure a free thing like that is always a good thing, right? So, as we walked over there, Z [one of our guides here] told us a little about Dvorak. He was a Czech composer who actually lived in the United States for a few years and, during his time there, he had a huge impact on the musical composition of the US. Before his work there, most of the pieces being written in the US were ignoring the local culture and just trying to mirror the music in Europe at the time. Dvorak decided to change that. He was a radical to some of the people around him. While he was here, he wanted to truly discover "American" music and help it develop. He believed that, in order for this to happen, people needed to look to the themes in the music from the American Indians and the African-Americans, both of which were more or less being completely ignored at this point. While he was there, he was the Director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City and taught some classes. According to Z, he taught a class with a non-white student, which caused him problems with his racist colleagues. He lived in the US from 1892-1895, so it was very uncommon to allow students who were not white into the classes.
This past weekend, there was an AIFS trip to Vienna planned, so of course I signed up. We left early in the morning on Friday to drive there in a bus. The ride wasn't too bad, but apparently there's a law in the Czech Republic that says that bus drivers have to have stops every few hours, which is kind of annoying. We had to stop two times during the five hour trip there, which is just insane to me. I don't understand even stopping once for a five hour trip, why would we have to do it two times? It just means that we're going to be making lots of stops on our way to Krakow in a week. One of the stops was at a place that kind of blew my mind a little bit. It was like the European version of South of the Border, right by the North and South Carolina borders, but instead of being Mexico themed, it was medieval themed. They had lots of rides, which were all coin operated, including rides that I would consider pretty potentially unsafe. They had a huge castle part that reminded me of the Enchanted Forest, which made me a homesick. Once we got to Vienna, we unpacked and got all settled in our hotel rooms and them met back in the lobby for a quick walking tour. We walked from our hotel to the city center and they pointed out how we can get back to the hotel from there and where they cheapest bars were. Guess they know our priorities. From there, we had the rest of the night to do whatever we wanted. I ended up walking around a little bit with some people, but then going to a great local restaurant right by our hotel. We all got weinersnitchel, which had insanely huge portions. Two people weren't even able to finish one full portion. After that, I was so exhausted that I just crashed for the night. I had been sick just before I left for the weekend, so I was still working on recovering somewhat.
The next morning, we were up really early to go on a more in depth tour of the city and then spend the rest of the day exploring for ourselves. The tour walked us through the whole city and Z would tell us all kinds of interesting facts about each and every building. I feel like he knows the full history of everything in the world. We walked all over, with the tour ending at the Votive Church in the middle of the city. It's a beautiful neo-Gothic church, which I actually can notice now. Since I've been here, I've actually learned how to tell the difference in the different types of architecture. I wasn't able to do that back in high school when I got tested on it, but apparently spending a semester being told all about it was all I needed to learn it. After getting to the church, we split into groups based on what everyone wanted to do. Most people just wanted to enjoy the weather and ride bikes around the city all day, but I ended up going along with the group headed to the Mozart Museum. Since I've been here decided that Mozart is probably my favorite composer. I've spent so much time learning about him and experiencing the places that he's been. His museum is actually in his former apartment, which I think is the only one still standing. When I get home, I am planning on rewatching the movie Amadeus, since all the parts from Prague are filmed on location. I just can't wait to see a movie showing the history of places where I've been. After that museum, we had to get a slice of the famous Sachertorte, a chocolate cake which is very popular and started in Vienna. The thing that makes it interesting in that, in between the cake and the chocolate icing, there's a layer of apricot jam. It was fantastic. From there, we decided that we needed to see the river, so we went off to find it. Since it's not a big tourist thing to go see, it took us a little while because there weren't signs and we had to chase down a map first. When we got over there, we found that we could walk near the edge of the river, which had walls around it, and admire the beautiful graffiti along the sides. All of the graffiti was so beautiful, or at least most of it was. They also had a bunch of paintings that were hung along the sides and some sculptures. It was basically a free outdoor art museum, which was really cool to get to see. After wandering that for a while, we were all getting a little hungry, so we decided to go check out this pub that Z told us about during our walk. There are two things which have made this place special. The first is it's association with some guy named Augustin. During the time of the Plague, he would play music in the pubs to entertain all the people who were dying of the plague. One night, after a little too much drinking at the pub, he ended up passing out in the middle of the streets. At that time, since the death toll was so high, each night people would come out with carts to collect all the dead bodies, like in Monty Python's Holy Grail with the men yelling "Bring out your dead!". While Augustin was passed out in the streets, the guys saw him and assumed that he was just another dead body, so they threw him onto the cart with the rest of the dead. At the end of the night, they tossed all the bodies into a mass grave, including the one live body. The next morning, this poor guy wakes up, probably still drunk or just feeling like crap, and finds himself surrounded by the dead and in a huge grave. So, like anyone would do, he started freaking out and yelling for anyone to help him. Luckily for him, some guy happened to hear him and they were able to save him. Somehow, even though he was surrounded by the freshly dead victims, he never contracted the plague, so he became a hero. For some reason, he is strongly associated with this pub we went to. But the second, and more famous, reason why tourists flock to this bar is in the back room of the area. Back in the day, this pub was the favorite of many of the great minds of Vienna. Everyone of importance who ever stayed in the city would visit this pub, to drink and share their ideas with their peers. At some point early on, the owners of the pub were able to convince the famous people to sign the ceiling of a room in the pub. To this day, they still have important people come to this pub and let them add their names to ceiling, so there are names like Johnny Cash right next to Mozart, Beethoven, and Mark Twain, among many others. After that, we wandered the city a little more until we realized how completely exhausted we were and headed back to the hotel for the night.
The next morning, a group of us woke up really early to get in line to see an interesting mass. First off, I do not approve of churches charging admission for a mass service, but that's what this church was doing. For those of us who are cheap college students, there was a tiny little area for standing room. The church was apparently from the Hapsburg empire, but that's not why it was so popular. It was the church where the Vienna Boys' Choir sings every Sunday. The service was mostly in German, so I didn't really know what was being said, but the boys in the choir sang beautifully. After that, we had to rush back to the hotel for checking out and going to Hunderwasser Haus. This is a weird place because of it's architecture. You should check out my pictures of this place. It was built in the mid 1980s and it looks almost like a child's view on an apartment building. It looks like something that no one would actually build, it's just so ridiculous. The colors are bright, there are no straight lines, even the floors are not completely flat. We didn't stay long there because we had to go to the Schonbrunn Palace. On the grounds there, there is a huge palace, the oldest zoo in the world, a maze, gardens, and a lot of interesting history. Most of the people who lived in the palace were very well known and important to history, but the only name that I really remember was Marie Antoinette. She lived there as a child before she married her way over to France. There was an audio tour of the place, but I didn't really know the history of the area well enough to really understand what was going on in the palace's history. After we wandered through the interior of the building, Kacie and I wandered through the gardens, just looking to see what we could find. We saw our first European squirrel. He had big, almost bunny-like, ears and was kinda a little more red in color than the squirrels at home. Also, it was sitting on a guy's lap. I wish that I had noticed it about 10 seconds earlier, then I would have had time to get a picture, but I was too late. The statues were cool and it was nice to just see green plants. In Prague, it's a lot colder and everything still looks kind of dead compared to Vienna. After about an hour exploring there, it was time to get back on the bus and head home to Prague.
It seems weird to me that I can say phrases like "head home to Prague" and that they don't even seem odd. They're just natural. Since I've been here, Prague has been feeling more and more like home, so it is going to be so weird going back to the US and readjusting to the live there.
