Day 11 - Centre Pieces and Singing Rapists

So as normal the full day of a city started off the same, me moaning about something or other. Today it was the fact that Vienna seemed to be one big building site. Since arriving into the city at the south station all I had seen was building sites or places covered in scaffolding. As we wandered down the main high street towards the city centre I kept pointing out to Mel each site/scaffolding as we went and when arriving in the main centre, in between some amazing palaces and museums the first thing I pointed out was the scaffolding on the side of a museum. Mel not best impressed by this information told me that I should give each place some time before judging it on first impressions. She was right because by the end of the day I would have seen two sights that I would not forget in a hurry.

The first was the Palace Hofburg the home of Empress Elizabeth (Sisi), which housed an amazing collection of glasses, plates, serving platters, centre pieces and much more, with some of them dating back to the 18th century. That was only the ground floor the rest of the Palace had been broken into 2 parts, the first was an exibition on the life of Sisi and the second was the rooms that Sisi and her husband had lived in. Armed with a very good audio guide we took the best part of an afternoon to tour the building, and was blown away with the detail of some of the items.

The second sight was a real treat and something that is in "1001 things to do before you die". While reading the map we saw that for 3 euro you could go and see the Opera standing at the back, all you had to do was arrive an hour before it started and wear trousers. So we joined the queue and managed to secure standing space at the back of the upper gallery with a pretty good view. Learning of the title of the Opera, Mel and the excited "young Owen Wilson" American next to me pointed out that "Don Giovanni" was written by Mozart. I then realised that I was at the Opera, in Vienna, watching "Don Giovanni", the closest that I would normally get to seeing this would be on a cinema screen and I would be paying around 25 pound for that, and it had little computer translators so we knew what was being said!

From this I have learnt to keep my mouth shut and wait to see what the day has in store for me!