| Rob Mystery Travel Diaries part 13 - X-mas2003! |
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| Xmas in Vienna. What is the romantic city to be when snow is falling next to you and your lover and Santa is racing through the imiginairy sky from one chimney to the next? Well when you live in Europe then Vienna is coming in to mind just after Paris. As both love the city and X-mas was a time to be off from Holland Pulp-family tradition, we took our suitcases and raced off to Vienna by car. Just days before our departure, the Alp countries had been struggling with hugh masses of snow and cold weather. When we crossed the Bavarian border and circled around Nurnberg and Munich there was hardly any snow to be seen nor did we met 30 km traffic jams with people sleeping in their cars. No, we reached Vienna as planned in the afternoon and had all the time in the world to take our first dive in to icy cold Vienna. December 24 is a bank holiday in Austria so we were bound to find most things closed but we did more then that, we discovered that a great number of shops and even restaurants were closed way up to December 29 to our big horror. The first warnings which we received from people who went before us was true. There was hardly any X-mas thingy to be seen in Vienna besides the commercial X-mas market in front of City Hall but we were more put off by the many season closing of shops and inns. We stayed at the Holiday Inn Vienna City Centre, which was conveniantly from the Opera and City itself. We both remember our first walk way to well as it was freezing �8. X-mas eve in Vienna and we were walking our feet off on the search for a restaurant which seemed not wanted to be found. Each Diner anouncement on the pavements was old or forgotten to remove, doors were closed, thank god that Josef and Maria were only written on name plates on the walls otherwise the X-mas story would have to be changed right that evening..J We had our X-mas diner at a small Kebab restaurant which seemed to be the only open place in town and celibrated our X-mas feeling with chocolate and champagne in our hotel room watching one X-mas films on our tv-set. After breakfast on X-mas day we walked through the city and spend part of the day in the Albertina Museum to see the exhibition of Gustav Klimt to Paul Klee, an international art exhibition. Many of the works I had seen before on previous Vienna visits when the Albertina wasn�t open yet and the work was scattered over other Vienna Musuems. The interior of the Albertina was amazing, being it part of the formal Royal Palace, you could only imagine what kind of space the Habsburger must have had 100 years ago. One museum a day was our plan so we wondered that afternoon through the city and walked in to the Harrar Palace and visited the Jew and Greek district of Vienna with their rich tradition and old houses. Olaf and I ended up in a very small inn where we enjoyed goulash and nockerln as a late lunch. |
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