Living large in Vienna! (Part III)

And the Vienna saga continues with Part III! If you missed Part II or Part I, you can find them at these links!

After our failed visit to the United Nations building, we decided to head to the Hofburg, the largest palace in Vienna. It was home to the royal Habsburg family, who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Perhaps you all might recognize it better as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire until Napoleon? In any case, it was an important place – and still is! It currently is home to many museums and serves as the official residence of the Austrian President.

The Hofburg is less of a palace and more of a compound. It’s huge! The palace and surrounding buildings underwent many, many renovations and additions! It’s a maze just finding the entrance!

We all decided that we wanted to tour the inside, and chose the tour that featured the National Silver Collection, The “Sisi” Museum, as well as the Royal Apartments.

The National Silver Collection was, umm… interesting? I didn’t know they needed so many dishes. It was like room, after room, after room, after room of dishes. These Habsburgs had all the plates, silverware, centerpieces, cups and mugs anyone could ever want. I’d imagine during the time of the empire it went something like, “Hey honey, do you want to eat off the china from the Queen of England or the plates made for the emperor of Mexico?”  “Oh! Why don’t we dine off the solid gold plates?”  “Great idea! We can have the 30 foot long centerpiece polished for dinner as well!”

So that was fun for about 10 minutes, but after 45 minutes of looking at dishes, we all lost our patience with that. Luckily, we were on to something a little more exciting. Now, to explain the rest of the tour I might have to go a little “history teacher on you guys,” so bear with me.

The Hofburg has a pretty decently sized museum called the “Sisi” museum. The museum is dedicated to Elisabeth (nicknamed Sisi), who was the Empress of Austria from 1854 until 1898. She married her cousin, Emperor Franz Joseph, when she was quite young (15, I think?) and was then forced into the royal spotlight. She was always kind of a “royal-rebel,” and towards the end of her life refused to partake in events and official ceremonies. Sisi also struggled with depression and (some believe) anorexia; her dresses were always measured to have a waist size between 18 and 19 inches!

It was fascinating seeing all the memorabilia from the time of Empress Elisabeth as well as learn about the history. This part of the Hofburg took another 50 minutes to get through, but it was definitely more interesting than the dishes.  😉  Perhaps my favorite quote from her was one she said after she heard that the emperor wanted to marry her. She said something along the lines of, “I do really like Franz Joseph, I only wish he weren’t the emperor.”

The last part of the tour was the royal apartments, and royal they were. Done up to the finest of Viennese standards, it was quite amazing. Those of you who have seen Schönbrunn will find it very similar (Schönbrunn was mainly used as their summer home, whereas The Hofburg was their main residence).

After this we were all pretty burnt out. Half of us decided to take a little break and head back to the hostel for an hour or two before dinner, while the others headed off to the Esperanto Museum. (Esperanto was a language that was constructed using elements of many languages and is very easy to learn. It was developed in Vienna to be the new international language, but never really caught on.)

We met up again for dinner at our favorite little Viennese restaurant and enjoyed our last “Wiener Schnitzel!” – which was fantastic, by the way!

The next day our flight didn’t leave until 4 p.m. or so, and because of that we had sort of an awkward amount of time where we had to be out of the hostel, but couldn’t go right to the airport, we bummed around in Starbucks. Quite literally.

We were all pretty exhausted from the long days of tourism, and (most of us) ended up falling asleep! Rachel even somehow ended up horizontal! The Starbucks workers in Vienna must of thought we were homeless or something.

All in all, it was quite the trip. We got to see lots of exciting things, much of which we’d only learned about in class or read in books!

In my next update, you all can look forward to hearing all about my classes here in Tübingen! Bis dann! Tschüß!