Day 111: Wet in Vienna

There was more rain pretty much constantly all day, but after staying in most of yesterday afternoon I wasn't about to spend the day sitting around. I took the subway downtown and started by just wandering around the old city. Vienna is a bit like Paris in that no matter what street you go down you're going to see huge fancy churches or ornate palace-looking buildings encrusted with sculpture or just streets packed with monuments and old historical buildings.




Vienna has a *lot* of museums and galleries. Since the weather wasn't the best, I figured it would be a good day to check out a few. During my down time yesterday I had done a bit of research and narrowed the places I was interested in down to a handful of 3 or 4. They are nice enough to group a lot of them together in one block, called "The Museum Quarter", with many others nearby in the same area, so it's quite easy to go to a lot of them. The first one I visited is the Kunsthistorisches Museum which is another of the top galleries in Europe. It's sculpture stuff was pretty sparse, but it had a wonderful collection of paintings. Although it had most of the big name, the specific paintings I was most familiar with were Bruegel's "The Tower of Babel" (which has always been one of my favourite biblical paintings) and the other half of the Arcimboldo collections "Seasons" and "Elements" that weren't in the Louvre.



Next I headed over to the Leopold Museum. It is billed as a modern art gallery, which makes me nervous, but most of its collection is pieces by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, both of whom I like a lot. Apparently today marks Klimt's 150th birthday and there was a special exhibit going on for him in addition to the normal collection. Unfortunately the Klimt collection didn't allow any photos, but the other stuff did - and honestly, I probably like Schiele's stuff more. Hard to believe he died at my age.




After that I just explored around some more, checking out a few of the big shopping streets, some churches, and wandering by the parliament and other big buildings. I have a few more museums I'm interested in, so I might do some more tomorrow, or do a few outdoorsy things depending on the weather. I don't mind the rain much as long as it keeps it nice and cool like it has.