What I thought was going to be a nice day to relax was in fact very busy and exciting. After our typical hotel breakfast, we had a plan to begin our day at three different museums in the city, about torture, Esperanto, and globes. The torture museum was the one we decided to go to first, so we got off at its metro stop. It took quite a while to find the museum, as it was under an large aquarium complex, but when we did, we were glad to see that it would be in English as well. What we essentially learned was a history of the torture devices used in Europe for centuries, and a bit of history of torture itself. Some of the devices we saw included the gallows, the leg screws, and the iron maiden. We also saw some tools of execution that were historically used around the world. The tour ended with an Amnesty International sponsored exhibit about human rights and the unethicality of torture.
The next two museums we visited were in one of the government buildings, so we got a combination ticket and used our Vienna Card to save some money. The first museum there was the Esperanto museum. Esperanto is a language that was developed in the late 19th century by a Polish linguist from Bialystok, who wanted to create an international language. His vision was for the entire world to have no language barriers. He tried to accomplish this goal by making an incredibly simple language with no special rules and exceptions in grammar. For example, all nouns end in o, all adjectives end in a, all adverbs end in e, and all infinitive verbs end in i. The museum focused on Esperanto in the media, and the efforts for it to become an international language. We saw many posters and products made in Esperanto, as well as some basic rules of the language. For example, the Movado watch is an Esperanto inspired brand that means "always moving."
The other museum in this complex was the Globe Museum. This museum had a vast collection of globes dating from the 1500s to the 2000s, and gave a history of how and why they were made. I saw 500-year old inaccurate globes used by the early explorers, I saw celestial globes, (maps of the stars as seen from the "outside") and even globes of other worlds like the moon and Mars. For someone who enjoys geography, I found the museum very interesting.
Our next planned activity was to ascend the mountain to the west of Vienna and visit the villages of Kahlenberg and Leopoldsberg for beautiful views of the city. To get to the villages, we took one of the metro lines to its terminus, and then took a bus from the station all the way to the top of the mountain. We started in Kahlenberg, which was a small village with a private university, hotel, and restaurants overlooking the city of Vienna. Due to some clouds, the view wasn't spectacular, but still nice to look at. The village itself was uninhabited until the 18th century, when Polish military forces, led by the Polish king, Jan Sobieski III helped to defend Austria from the Turks. Because of this, there was a Polish church there and many of the people in the village spoke Polish.
Next, we wanted to go to the nearby village of Leopoldsberg, but we didn't quite know which path to take. To be safe, we just followed the road but joined a path towards the village halfway there. At Leopoldsberg, there was a fort used by the Polish army, and even more spectacular views of the city, despite the clouds. If we went to the villages on a sunny day, the views would be simply amazing. We took the walking path all the way back to Kahlenberg and noticed that it was significantly shorter than the winding roads, so we had time to have a quick snack overlooking Vienna before taking the bus and metro back to the city.
Since we were exhausted, we rested for about an hour at the hotel, but we decided to then go to the film festival at the Rathaus (town hall, pictured above) at around 8:30PM. Today's showing was a recorded concert of Beethoven's ninth symphony in one of Vienna's concert halls, which was quite interesting with such a massive screen and soundsystem. It almost felt like we were there.
Tomorrow will be our last day in Vienna, so we'll probably visit the church in Stephansplatz, and possibly visit the cemetery where Mozart and Beethoven lay. In the evening, we will take a riverboat to Bratislava, Slovakia, to begin our two-night stay there. Vienna has been a great and exciting city, and I hope to be able to visit it again in the future.
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