2006 retirement tripAustria April 8 to April 11

Vienna

Saturday 8 April, 2006  Very early on Saturday morning we flew  from Madrid to Vienna; flying time three hours. During the remainder of today and the next day we walked all over Vienna from the north near Liechenstein Park to the south at the Belvedere Garden.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  We got to our hotel in Gruenentorgasse (near the top of the map) at 11:00 but our room wasn't ready. So we wandered down Rathauspark, and then looped back past the University Wien back to our room.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  Saturday around midday as we start our walk and we're amazed at how peaceful everything is.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  We've gone just a few hundred metres and already we've stumbled across our first church.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  It's the Votivkirche, one of the most important neo-Gothic religious architectural sites in the world (we're told).
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  Construction began in 1856, and it was dedicated twenty-six years later in 1879.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The twin spires can be seen all over Vienna. There's some scaffolding visible at the bottom of the picture.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  But by now I've had enough of bloody cathedrals, especially Gothic which I detest, so we continue on.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The light rail system in Vienna is partly underground as we discover later. Here it's coming back to ground level.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  This is Sigmand Freud Park.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  We don't get very far before another grand building takes our eye. Police cars in the foreground.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  We walk towards the building and are distressed to find, just like Spain, the grass full of dog poop.  Bloody disgusting.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  Cafe Einstein on Rathausplatz. Rathaus?
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The Rathaus is a building that serves as the seat of both the mayor and city council of the city of Vienna.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The Rathaus was designed by Friedrich von Schmidt in the Gothic style, and built between 1872 and 1883.  Schmidt took a special course in "ugly" before designing the building.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  On the top of the tower is the Rathausmann, one of the symbols of Vienna.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  Facing the Rathaus is a large park, the Rathauspark. We wander through the park and discover . . .
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  . . . the K K Hofberg Theater.  The Burgtheater is the Austrian National Theatre and is one of the most important German language theatres in the world.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The Burgtheater was created in 1741 and has become known as "die Burg" by the Viennese population. We turn back towards the hotel and make another discovery . . .
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  . . . the University of Vienna (Universität Wien). Opposite the university is a magnificent monument of Johann Andreas von Liebenberg, Mayor of Vienna 1680.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The statue is topped with an angel decorated in brilliant gold. Behind the monument is the Beethoven Pasqualati House where Beethoven lived for about 8 years.  Pasqualati was a patron of Beethoven's and the house is now a small museum.  It apparently  has very few  of Beethoven's possessions in it and it seems to be more of a small apartment than a museum.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The University of Vienna is a public university.  It opened in 1365 and is one of the oldest universities in Europe.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  The university offers more than 130 courses of study and is attended by more than 63,000 students.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  On our way back, we happen across a light rail terminus.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  As we live right next to the Kuring-Gai National Park in Sydney, this name had a familiar ring (pun) to it.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  Underneath the terminus is a spotlessly clean and modern fast-food plaza.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  Looking from the terminus, across Sigmund Freud Park, we can see that the Votivkirche is undergoing some restoration.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  My German is improving; Gute means good, and Fahrt means break wind. Quite an unusual sign really.  Many years later, I decide to look this up and I was half right,  it means "good ride" and  It seems to be free parking for bicycles.  I'm dead against this because it only encourages more of them.
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Saturday 8 April, 2006  We decide not to eat here tonight as it might possibly be unsanitary.  When we got  back to the hotel we watched Rossi win the Qatar GP. We had dinner at a nearby pub where language was not a problem. So far, we love Austria; it is far more welcoming than Spain.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The next Day, Sunday, we walk from our hotel at the top of the map, through the city to the Belvedere Palace at the bottom. Then we walk back via an entirely different route.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  It's Sunday morning and it's very quiet as we leave our hotel. This is very different to Spain. There's NO traffic.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Even the main throughfares are deserted.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We head for a tributary of the Danube called the Danube Canal.  The Danube flows through and forms a part of the borders of  ten countries: Germany , Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Ukraine.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We walk south beside the canal and head into an area of Vienna called the Hoer Markt Area. This was the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth and there were no end of reminders. This is a romantic poem penned by him in 1789 and a bit weird that it is in English.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Anker Insurance Clock spans two buildings. During the course of 12 hours, 12 of Vienna’s historical figures move across the bridge. At noon there is a parade of all 12 figures accompanied by a ten minute medley of organ music.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We wander down through Hoher Markt into the Stephansdom area and we start to come across open air cafes.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  St. Stephen's Cathedral (German: Stephansdom) is on the left.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Near the church. Tourism is big business in Vienna.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  This was the Sunday before Easter Friday and religious celebrations were about to start at the Stephansdom.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  A religious parade, connected to Easter perhaps, on its way to Stephansdom.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  That thing he is swinging is called a censer (a container for burning incense, especially one that is swung on a chain, in a religious ritual). It wards off evil spirits.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Vienna is predominantly Catholic, nearly 50%. The next most common religion is none at 25%.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Stephansdom's roof is ornately patterned, richly coloured and covered by 230,000 glazed tiles.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Stephansdom leads into Karntnerstrasse which is now a pedestrian mall.  It seems to be Vienna's main shopping plaza.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Being Sunday, most of the stores were shut.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  One of the stores is Mostly Mozart. These are all over the place.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Looking down the plaza of the Karntnerstrasse.  It's still fairly empty.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Nice to see that hot dogs and McDonalds are available. I don't understand the "no people" sign.   DECEMBER 2009. After our trip to Germany in March 2009, now I understand. It means it's the end of the pedestrians only section.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Very fussy buildings but at least these two had some colour. We're both still not sure right now why we found the buildings in Madrid vastly more attractive
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  J&L Lobmeyr is a retailer of fine glassware and porcelain.  The firm has been in business since the early 19th century, when it exclusively supplied the imperial court.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We see the Hotel Astoria walking down Karntnerstrasse. Well, you know what I mean.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Vienna State Opera is one of the most important opera companies in Europe. Until 1920 it was named the Vienna Court Opera.  It's in Kärntner Straße at the very end of the pedestrian mall.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  I took this photo because the cab was a Mazda6 and we owned a Mazda6 at the time. The W on the plate means that it is from Wien (Vienna).
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The casino is the big building on the left, also in Kärntner Straße.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We walk down Karntner Ringstraße. "Anfang" means beginning
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  This is the Monument to the Red Army. It was built by the Russians to commemorate 18,000 soldiers who died during the "liberation" of Vienna from the Germans. The monument was unveiled on 19 August 1945.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  At the end of WWII Vienna was divided into different districts governed by different allied forces, one of which was Russian. The monument has a 12m high bronze statue of a Soviet soldier holding a Soviet flag set upon a marble base.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The inscription states that the monument 'honours the soldiers of the Soviet army, pleased for release of Austria from fascism'.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We continued our walk up Prinz  Eugen Strasse, seeing the Belvedere palace behind high walls and wondering how we were to get in.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Aha! A gate. That could be the way in.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  With my in-depth knowledge of German, I read that € 5 million was being spent to upgrade the Belvedere and that it was due for completion in 2008.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Front facade of the Upper Belvedere. The reason we're here is to look at a large collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  It's full name is Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. Its art collection includes masterpieces from the Middle Ages and Baroque until the 21st century,
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Although it focuses on Austrian painters from the Fin de Siècle and Art Nouveau period, the best known artists on display are Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Ornate housing surrounds the Belvedere.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Kiss by Gustav Klimt.  Painted in 1907-08. To see the actual painting was indescribable. I went back to see it several times and each time I saw a little more, like the feet hanging over the edge of a flowered precipice. Later, I finally saw the outline of the woman's body. Klimt painted this during his golden period in which he used raised, gold leaf for emphasis; the curly bits on the man's robe is like this.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The man is wearing a crown of vines and her feet are draped with triangular-shaped vines, which expresses fertility because these vines grow rapidly. The left bottom part of the flower bed was added later after the original was displayed unfinished; it is quite different to the rest of the flower bed. The bronze background is flecks of gold leaf. Her shoulder is bare and she receives the kiss but is not, as yet, returning it. Absolutely fabulous!
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  another of Klimt's famous paintings: Judith 1. This is another painting in which you see more, the more you look at it.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Judith 1 is based on an ancient story from some versions of the old testament about the Jewish widow     Judith     who saved her home town during a siege by beguiling the general Holofernes with her beauty. Having made him drunk, she cut off his head with his own sword.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The full story of Judith and Holofernes
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Every time I see this I say to myself  "My God but this is beautiful".  It's a painting done in 1850 by Franz Eybl called "A girl reading". Franz Ebyl was Viennese and lived between 1806 and 1880.  Interesting aside: Eybl died at his official residence here in the Belvedere and is buried at Vienna's famous Zentralfriedhof (Central cemetery)  where notable figures such as Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert are interred. He died at the age of 74 in 1880.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We also saw paintings by Renoir and Van Gogh. On the top floor were portraits of long dead nobility.  Nobility always seemed to be scrawny, pallid of complexion, and with their faces fixed in a permanent sneer.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  At the bottom of the garden is the Lower Belvedere. It was built in 1716 before the Upper Belvedere.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The gardens have gone through many different styles and themes since they were first built in 1716.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  They are in the process of being remodelled as part of the restoration program.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Upper Belvedere was built in 1720-1723 and it was originally intended to provide a suitable end to the main garden axis.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Hotel Sacher is a five-star hotel in the Innenstadt next to the State Opera. The hotel is built where Antonio Vivaldi once lived and was founded in 1876 by Eduard Sacher as a furnished apartment.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Elegant ladies near the Sacher Hotel. Another one of those funny Mozart signs is in the background
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  There is a small restaurant in the Sacher hotel which serves its famous speciality of the house, the Sachertorte chocolate cake.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  It has a genuine Sachertorte medallion on the top and tastes about the same as a packet-mix cake that you would buy from a NSW train station.  Whipped cream straight from a pressure-pack can. Not cheap either.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Behind the Sacher hotel is the Albertina. It is a museum that houses one of the largest print collections in the world with  65,000 drawings, 1 million old master prints and more modern graphics works.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We climb the steps to the Albertina and look back down at the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera).
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Swinging the camera around to the left we see another side of the Sacha Hotel.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Looking to the northeast, we can see the Hofburg Imperial Palace. In front of us is the Palmenhaus Burggarten built in 1822 which is part of the Hofburg Palace. The 2050 sqm. building houses plants and a  tropical butterfly house.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We walk past the Burggarten where dogs are banned. The garden contains monuments of Mozart, Goethe and Emperor Franz Joseph I.  A  Butterfly House was constructed in the Burggarten in 1901.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Burggarten in front of the Hofberg. It was once the private strolling area of the emperor.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Hofburg Imperial Palace has housed some of the most powerful people in Austrian history, including the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the    Habsburg dynasty   .
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The     Hofberg Palace    currently serves as the official residence of the President of Austria. It is also the home of numerous museums and galleries.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  My princess.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We walk around the side of the Hofberg into  Heldenplatz  (Heroes' Square) behind it.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Hofburg Palace was the Habsburg's principal winter residence, while Schönbrunn Palace was their preferred summer residence. The Palace was the birthplace of    Marie Antoinette    in 1755.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Many important  events took place here , most notoriously Adolf Hitler's announcement of the    Anschluss    (joining) of Austria to the German Reich in 1938.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Anschluss was the 1938 Nazi annexation of Austria.  Shortly after, the Nazis held a plebiscite  asking the people to ratify what had already been done. Reinforced by  Wehrmacht troops, they received 99.73% of the vote.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  After Anschluss, Austria ceased to exist as a nation until late 1945.  A Provisional Austrian Government was established in 1945 and it was legally recognised by the Allies shortly after.  Austria did not regain full sovereignty until 1955.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Looking across the Heldenplatz, the spires of the Rathaus can be seen.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Statue of Archduke Charles of Austria in the Heldenplatz who remains among Austria's greatest heroes of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Tourism is big business in Vienna and, unlike Spain, English is widely spoken. This makes Vienna a vastly more enjoyable place to visit in many respects.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The dome over the entrance to the Kaiser Apartments.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  This is the courtyard area between the main entrance on Michaelerplatz and the Heldenplatz with a Monument to Emperor Franz I.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The main entrance to the Hofburg Palace from Michaelerplatz leads to a huge courtyard . A second passageway then leads from that courtyard to the oldest area of the palace.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Looking through the main entrance to Michaelerplatz.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Outside the main gate in Michaelerplatz.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  The Roman Ruins located beneath Michaelerplatz Square.  The ruins date back to a time when Vienna was part of the Roman Empire.  A roman aqueduct is one of the visible features.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  As we very slowly and painfully walked back to our hotel, we came across market stalls in The Freyung.  Freyung is a triangular public  square located in the first district.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We bought some chocolate-covered strawberries and chocolate-covered plums as a treat to ourselves.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Jenni then explored the markets in some depth.  Jenni likes markets and was a little market-starved.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  We returned to our hotel and had a sleep.  Jenni then put a call through to our friend Claus Maikis to arrange our meeting with him in Salzburg tomorrow.
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Sunday 9  April, 2006  Memories of Vienna: a friendly, civilized place you'd recommend to your friends. We had planned to return to Vienna after meeting Claus in Salzburg but our plans got changed for us. 1½  days in Vienna was nowhere near enough.      END OF OUR VIENNA STORY     Next stop Salzburg.
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SalzburgNext: Salzburg
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