Vienna

Very restless night last night - it was hot and still, and nobody seemed to be sleeping, going by the numbers of lights on in tents and people sitting outside just trying to get cool. I was so tired nothing was going to keep me awake, but in the early hours of the morning I was half-woken by a long burst of lightning so bright and frequent that it was almost as though someone had turned on a strobe light. I could hear the first pitter-patterings of rain on the tent and, as I'd brought my gizmos into my tent and I'm still not 100% confident about its water-proof-ness, I threw everything into my sleeping bag and raced for the car before the deluge hit.

I slept well once there, but woke early - as soon as the sun hits whatever you're sleeping in, whether tent or car, the temperature rises so quickly that it's impossible to stay asleep. After a few deliciously lazy hours getting my gear in order, having a luxuriously long shower and pottering around on the internet, I headed into town, aiming for Schloss Schonbrunn.

On the pathway between Schloss Schonbrunn and the nearest train station was this whistling "Mozart" - if anyone tossed some money into the pot at the foot of his pedestal, he would whistle a few bars of something composed by Mozart and pose for a picture.

Schloss Schonbrunn (Schonbrunn Palace), is quite the understated little place. Not. It was the summer home of the Austrian imperial family for centuries and they certainly don't seem to have held themselves back in either its construction or its decoration.

See what I mean? Understated. On opposites day.

RB, as you would know, the historians responsible for presenting this museum had to pick one era to show and they selected the time of Emperor Franz Joseph (1830-1916). This gentleman seems to have been fairly simple in his tastes, and considered himself the prime chief servant of his country, which I think is a nice way of looking at it, and quite humble for a man who, besides being the Austrian emperor was also king of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia. Upon showing your ticket at the allocated time (the palace is a very popular tourist attraction, and after waiting for some time in the midst of the milling throng I was very conscious of the fact that this is peak tourist season), his public audience room, study and bedroom were the first rooms you entered. They were comparatively plainly decorated in browns and blues, and featured paintings of his family. 

To an ordinary person, these rooms would have seemed very grand, and they did to me, so I couldn't quite understand why they kept saying the rooms were simply decorated. But the more you moved through the state rooms the more you realised that, by comparison, Franz Joseph's rooms were the imperial equivalent of a stone hermit's cell. I don't think I've ever seen so much gold and silver, so many mirrors, such detailed parquetry or expensive lacquer-work gathered together in my life. There was a private concert room, which was where the young Mozart played for the Empress for the first time, and after his performance hopped up on her lap, wrapped his arms around her neck, and gave her a big kiss. But this was nothing compared to the grand gallery, which took my breath away. 

When I entered it, the audio guide I was carrying started playing the Blue Danube waltz, and in this context it made the most perfect sense. It was all I could do to keep myself from keeping time with the music and dancing down this long room, with its white walls thick with gold and crystal mirrors, its red carpet and windows looking out into the vast square before the palace which was so large that it quite dwarfed the horses-and-carriages which stood in it. I had to settle instead for imagining it all, and it wasn't hard to take a leap into the Vienna of bygone centuries, populating the room with women in gorgeous gowns and men in their courtliest attire, the room echoing to music and the sounds of their footsteps.

As if such scenes were not enough for this long hall to have in its past, it was also the site of the historic 1961 summit meeting between the two leaders of the Cold War superpowers, John F Kennedy and Khrushchev. A nearby room was the one in which Emperor Karl I of Austria was persuaded to renounce all participation in the state affairs of Austria in 1918. He refused to abdicate his role as Emperor however and was forced into exile. He died in 1922, still an exile, and the last Emperor of Austria, the last King of Hungary, and the last monarch of the 600-year-old House of Habsburg-Lorraine. (Interesting side note: while checking dates for this post, I found that this gentleman was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2004 and so is now often known as Blessed Charles of Austria.)

Altogether, there was a sense of being on the tip of an iceberg comprised of historical, political and personal clashes of titans - and I can't wait to get home to read more about the history of the Habsburg family and Schonbrunn palace.

After the staterooms, I visited the orangery, private Imperial garden, maze and Glorietta (umm ... very fancy building up the back of the palace yard?), and spent some time wandering the wilderness section of the grounds, very glad of the cool green shade on a hot summer's day, and spying out all the places I would have conducted intrigues if I had been one of the 1500 people inhabiting the palace in its heyday.

The water feature in the back yard. (I've left the two random strangers in for scale.)

A little sculpture - no garden gnomes here, this is meant to replicate some Roman ruins. The tips of the heads of the sculptures you can see at the top of the reeds are life-size.

The maze. Because what point is there to being an Emperor if you can't have your own maze?

This subtle thing is, I don't know, perhaps the equivalent of a shade house in the average back yard? One Empress was pretty proud of a number of reforms she had implemented so she built this to commemorate them. And then called it a Glorietta. She was obviously a modest kind of a woman.

Then a quick stop to see the buildings of the UN in Vienna, a complex of multiple huge, curved buildings only a few blocks away from where I'm camping. I got quite a thrill, seeing the long, curving row of flags of all the united nationsin the main courtyard - I think I first saw such a display in footage of the UN buildings in New York, and it always seemed a physical representation of the ideal for which the UN stands, that of all nations of the world coming together as equals to work for a peaceful future.

It's nearly 8pm as I write this and it's still very hot - I'm tired but it's much too warm to even think about going to sleep any time soon, so I think I'll take myself out for a twilight wander along the Danube when I finish this post, just because I can (and when am I ever going to be able to say that again in the whole course of my life). :)