Vienna

Why is there a horrible food product sold in the States that is called Vienna Sausages? Tiny, tasteless (unless you consider tin-flavored sawdust mixed with lard to be tasteful) sausage-like items stacked like vertical sardines in a can bear no relation to the sausages served in Vienna.

So, after arriving in Vienna in the evening, we dumped our bags at the Intercity Hotel Wien, which is only a block away from the Westbahnhof. Not only conveniently located, it was a pretty nice hotel. Few frills, but the frills it did have were quite nice and the price was definitely right. I highly recommend it. Just be aware that you need to put your room cardkey in the slot just inside the door before the lights will turn on. It’s a great way to keep people from wasting money by leaving the room lights on, though.

We then stumbled (for having been traveling as long as we had in the past 30 hours, it’s amazing we weren’t crawling) over to the Gästhaus Francesci (formerly, Gästhaus Siebold) for dinner. Inga, a quiet Austrian, married Tony Francesci, a garrulous former trucking company owner from the San Francisco Bay area. We talked to him for quite a while about the Bay area. Tony is quite a character. It would probably be more accurate to say we listened rather than we talked. Especially when he told us the story of when his family traveled to Empire, Alabama, to see the only statue in the US dedicated to an insect. The statue is of a woman holding some sort of platter with a large boll weevil on it. Or at least that is what I think he said.

The next day we went to see “Crazy Love: From Dalí, to Bacon” at the Kunstforum. This fantastic exhibit includes many famous (and some not so famous, but still brilliant) works of surrealist art and more from the private collection of Ulla & Heiner Pietzsch. Picasso, Breton, Ernst, Tanguy, David Smith, Rothko, Miró, Pollock, Motherwell, Masson, Magritte, Delvaux, and the list goes on and on. There was even a Kahlo and a Rivera thrown in for good measure.

After being blown away by the art, we wandered in the cold in the nearby Volksgarten. Little did we know that the cold weather would continue for the first part of our trip. And, yes, I am backdating these posts so they appear roughly at the corresponding times of our trip.