#hunderwasser

Building by Friedensreichs Hundertwasser in Bad Blumau, Austria, 21 April 2018

Thus far, our stay in Vienna has been a blast. We've made new friends, explored the city at length, and endured about one week straight of rain. Among many surprises, Vienna has surprised me in how absolutely massive it is - about the same size as Barcelona. In smaller cities, I can learn the street layout and have a general sense of direction after a few days of strolling. In Vienna, not so; as I walk around the city, I usually have only a vague sense of where I am and of where the famous monuments sit in relation to one another.

At the end of our first week, we enjoyed a bus tour of the whole city. During the tour, our bus scaled the foothills of the Alps, into the Vienna Woods. At the peak of the road, we arrived at a tourist-filled lookout, from which we could see all of Vienna. It confirmed my suspicions about how vast Vienna truly is. The panoramic view was simply stunning, as Adrian has captured in his photo below.

Next, we visited the museum of Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928 - 2000), a modern architect and artist who designed a housing project in Vienna. The apartment building is still in use, and is fantastically creative. The floors are not all flat, the walls are full of mosaic tiles and bright colors, and the roof is actually a garden replete with full sized trees. Inspired by architect Antonio Gaudi, Hundertwasser had no regard for convention and designed some of the wackiest architecture I’ve ever seen. It was a pleasure to see. Every city could use some more architects like Hunderwasser that have a sense of humor; it makes the city incalculably more fun to walk through.

Finally, we visited the famous Belvedere Palace, which served as the summer home of Prince Eugene of Savoy in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The name Belvedere means "Beautiful View" in French, which is apparently what one royal guest said when she first saw the view from the palace to St. Stephen's Cathedral, whose steeple is visible from the palace gardens and sits in the dead-center of downtown Vienna. We didn't enter the Palace (we're saving that for a later date), but the gardens and the Belvedere's facade are truly spectacular.