ST STEPHANS AND THE MUSEUMS

As I said yesterday, we were on overload at the sights and sounds of Vienna. The center of the city is St Stephan’s cathedral, Stephansdom, and even that itself an overload. It is huge, and it is apparently constantly being worked on. There are school children out on the streets collecting money to fix the tower, and when we asked them why THEY had to collect the money, they stated that they got the day off from school if they would go out collecting! There are horses and carriages circling the main streets around the pedestrian square, and high end shops and souvenir junk (tourist trash at its worst!) for the many tourists that are constantly around. And as always, wonderful buildings, fountains, and sculptures all mixed in together.
The Museums are world class and we were glad to be able to do as much as we did and still have more for another trip. On Museum night, we saw the Egon Shiele landscape exhibits at the Leopold, accompanied by a string orchestra, and tried to get into the Mike Kelley exhibit at the Modern (MUMOK), but my claustrophobia kicked in when we could not get to the sixth floor exhibit without a surging mob accompanying us. We walked around the Museumsquartier complex, one of the biggest cultural complexes in the world (but that does not make it better, right?). The next day we devoted to the Kunsthisoriches (Museum of Fine Arts) picture collection in one of the finest huge Baroque buildings in our quarter. Our light lunch there was eaten in the incredible opulence of the Museum café, which was advertising their New Year’s Eve buffet. It really looked inviting.
Anyway, the Rubens collection there was so extensive we decided to skip the Albertina Museum Rubens show in the afternoon and go on to the Art Deco style Secession Museum, the renegade museum that was heavily damaged during the US bombings in WW 2. There is a Gustav Klimt frieze that had been relocated there, and it was well worth seeing, as it was these drawings that came just before his famous gold period work, The Kiss. The Secession is really close to the permanent market that was a lot of fun to walk around.