Premshree's (品速力) Personal Weblog

After Stephansdom, I went to the Hofburg Imperial Palace. Looking for the Hofburg Imperial Palace, rather. It’s walking distance. I don’t remember which street I walked through; it won’t be difficult for you to figure out in any case. Maybe you could walk to the Opera, and figure out from there. I didn’t really go inside the palace or anything (I don’t even know if one can go in—it serves as the residence of the President of Austria) but, anyway, the walk to the place is fun. Looking at the map now, I think I walked through Heldenplatz. Yeah, positive. (Sidenote: if you need to use a loo, there’s one in here, in Heldenplatz. It’s just outside the entrance to the Imperial Palace. 1€ to use the loo; 0.5€ to use the urinal. Just mentioning this because the loos in stations are not very clean.)

After that I headed to the Kunsthistorisches Museum (entrance: 10€). Again, walking distance. Opposite this is the Naturhistorisches Museum (I didn’t go there). Photography is permitted in most (all?) museums here, but you’re not allowed to use the flash, of course. Here are some pictures:

I then randomly walked across the road and landed at MuseumsQuartier. Just walked around there a bit before heading to a kaffe haus. I took a random street to look for a café. I ended at this small place called Cafe Kafka. The staff didn’t speak English, so I had an interesting time trying to explain what I wanted.

It was about 15:00 or so at this point, so I still had lot of daylight. Again, I walked on a random street, and I saw... snow! Lots of it. I had never seen snow before I came to Vienna.

Later in the night, after taking some rest in the dorm, I headed out to look for one of the recommended bars. Then, halfway, I decided I didn’t want to go to bar alone. While walking back to the hostel, I cam across Rani, an Indian restaurant recommended by folks here. I had no intention to have Indian food, but I wanted to check the place out anyway. People like it! The place is quite cheap (vegetarian curries costs between two and three euros), and servings are large. I mean really large. It’s run by Indians (Punjabis); they’ve been in Vienna for about ten years. (Sidenote: most Indians I saw in Vienna were newspaper vendors from Punjab.) I just had a mug of beer and left.

I’ve uploaded quite a few pictures today. All pictures from Vienna so far »

The most prominent place you’d see on any map of Vienna is Stephansplatz. That’s where St. Stepehen’s cathedral is. Getting there is straightforward: just take the U3 from Westbahnof to Stephansplatz. Come out of the station, and you’ll know what you need to look for.

I had gotten there pretty early—somewhere around 7 AM (yeah!). And that, I think, was a bad idea. There’s not many people around at that time. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just walked down toward Schwedenplatz, then turned around and walked down toward the Opera. Turned around (again), and walked toward the Opera (again), on Rotenturmstraße. I was hungry at this point (Vienna is known for its cafés, so I decided that I’ll do all my eating only from those places), so I ended up at Daniel Moser. Not a very big café, but it’s good enough, and not very expensive—4.7€ (I think) for a Viennese breakfast.

Now was a good time to go into the cathedral. When I got there, there were loads of people around—a lot of them tourists (mostly from Japan). The cathedral is quite nice; nothing fentabulous, though. I walked around inside the cathedral for a while.

The nice thing about this place is the South Tower. I asked a few folks how to get on top of the tower. There used to be an entrance from inside the cathedral, but for some reason it was closed. Anyway, so you need to enter from outside (exit the cathedral, take a left, walk around).

This is the view from the top (click on the pic for a larger view):

Like you can see, climbing the tower is a rewarding experience.

Pictures from and around Stephansplatz »