Vienna, Part Last

Another TUS flight (see our post on Israel) safely returned us to Vienna and Mark for a few more days.  We'd missed our morning mile and a half walks to Café Prückel, and so off we went for one last breakfast before leaving for our #VanLife home..

 

In defense of Vienna, it's very easy to get to Prückel by tram, but we enjoyed the walk.  In celebration of Vienna, they don't hurry you along,  the wait staff wears tuxes, except in the morning when they don't wear their coats, and they provide us with an English version of the New York Times to accompany our meal.  We ordered  schnittlelauchbrot, a wonderful breakfast that is buttered rye bread covered in chives.  Despite how that sounds to our ears, it is delicious!

Würstlestands - hot dog, bratwurst, etc stands joined the Cafe Culture in Vienna in 2011 as intangible UNESCO Cultural sites.  These stands, sort of lowly places to eat, are everywhere and the sausages are good.  Mark loves them.   They either serve the bratwurst in a heated roll, which is  Mark's and Bill's preference, 

 or sliced with sides of mustard and grated horseradish, which is my favorite.  One gets a slice of the wurst on the fork, dips it in the mustard and then the horseradish, and is it ever good!  We recreated a vegan version in Baby Beluga -- the sides where just as good, but the US version of bratwurst falls very short of the delicious Viennese version. 

Soon after we returned to the US, we headed to Austin to visit my brother.  While on the way we stopped at a food truck in Alpine, Texas serving vegan brats. It was, like the Viennese version, served with  mustard.  But it has a nopales (cactus) salsa instead of horseradish on it. 

Which culture had the better bratwürst experience?  We can't decide, but we are sure grateful to be able to experience different cultures.

Any way, I've digressed far away from our last three days in Vienna.  Our last touristy stop was the State Library inside the Hapsburg's winter palace.

 Oh my, what a beauty that place was--  

On our way back through the touristy Viennese downtown. I bought a beautiful sweater.  I wore it a couple of days and then I left it in Mark's apartment! What?  Mark will bring it next time he comes to the US.  I will be very excited to see it again! 

The last two days we did more touristy things, just not in Vienna. We rented a car to see a little bit of  the rest of Austria.  We followed the  Danube to Salzburg, Austria, home of Fortress Hoensalzburg -- a castle really high up over the city dating from the 11th Century.   And its gorgeous! And reachable only by walking up a steep cobblestone street and THEN taking a cog railroad the rest of the way: 

https://www.theworldisabook.com/19562/salzburg-with-kids-hohensalzburg-fortress/. This website has fantastic pictures of the inside and the views of the city below.  Please take a look there -- my pictures were OK (the best they ever are) but there is SO much in this castle to see.  There's everything from amazing dioramas to puppet shows, to the preservations of the rooms, to armor, and so much more.  This is a room dating from the 1060's or so.   

Heat is provided by these beautiful ceramic stoves.

Some recovered details.

Descending the funicular to its mid-point.

Day Two of driving outside of Vienna brought us to a very different kind of architecture -- very whimsical and lots of fun.  The architect is Friedensreich Hendertwasser, an Austrian architect and visual artist who didn't like straight lines.   He designed important buildings, like a housing project in Vienna as well as the building that houses the Wein Energy offices and a co-generation site.  These pictures, however, are of a McDonald's he designed for a highway rest area. 

Mark also directed us to some ruins of the Roman Empire -- we can't imagine having that kind of history on our doorstep.  Interesting  to see-- you can drive through some of them, but mostly what we saw is an arena of some sort.  Chariots and lions come to mind.

Where the lion's entered....we are pretty sure there were no lions roaming the countryside of the  Roman Empire, but one can imagine....

And our last day, and a sad day, we didn't want to leave.... Mark drove us to the airport and returned the car on our behalf before he went to work.  This was January 13th -- just about 12  hours before our luggage took an hour to find us in Chicago and we nearly missed our connecting flights, and just 20 hours before we reclaimed Baby Beluga from a Tucson parking lot.  And it was  just 8 days before the inauguration and the beginning of whatever it is we are experiencing now.  The worlds of both our sons who work for the State Department got a little crazy.  As did ours.

VOYAYA