Our Man in Venice

HARRY LIME'S HAT BAND, VIENNA: So we finally made it out of Cesky Krumlov on a 6 AM bus. Travel, it sometimes seems, has less to do with experiencing culture and history and more to do with your backpack finding new ways of torturing you. Dragging two extremely laden backpacks down a very narrow aisle in a pre-dawn bus filled with school kids and early morning wage slaves is one of them. Lugging it down the aisle of a narrow Eurotrain is something I'm quite used to.

Vienna is quite a beautiful city. Yesterday we caught a train into town and wandered around for a little bit getting blown away by the Gothic St. Stephen's cathedral and the uber-Gothic Parliament building which ranks among the most impressive buildings we've seen all trip. Then we went and visited the Hofburg palace which was home to the Hapsburgs. One thing I've really learnt on this trip is my architecture. I can differentiate the Baroque from the Gothic at 2k's. And what I've discovered about the Baroque is... that I don't really like it. I think it looks like the flowery, ornate armrests on a musty armchair in a house where somebody has recently died, only painted ruby red and gold.

Anyway the Hapsburgs seemed to live a life of unimagineable luxury, as evidenced by their silver dinner sets and ornate tangines. Actually I enjoyed looking at their crockery cupboard far more than I thought I would. And I was suprised by how Eurotrash the Hapsburgs where. I mean Emperor Franz Joseph, with a moustache that would put Sonny Barger to shame, marries his fifteen year old cousin then sometime later his son is involved in a murder suicide thing with his much younger girlfriend. I guess all they needed was an appearance on Springer.

Today we rode the tram around the city and took in the beautiful buildings... TWICE. It really is a beautiful city and because it isn't quite as cold as some places we've been, some of the gardens are green. Oh and did I mention we've had two sunny days.

Today we visited the famed Kunsthistoriches Museum which is the main reason we detoured to Austira. In it there is a room that contains no less than fourteen Pieter Brueghel the Elders so needless to say that's where we spent most of the morning. The room included pictures as famous as Children's Games, The Hunters, Early Spring and the Tower of Babel. There were some other cool pictures including some by Giorgione, Rembrandt, Bosch and Cannaletto.

Finally we finished the day off with a visit to the Danube at which point we started to freeze to death and didn't feel at all like waltzing to a Strauss tune.