Whining About Wine in Wien

Mmkay, that title has nothing to do with anything. But I thought it looked cool. There is nothing wrong with their wine. That I'm aware of. And Wien is Vienna, by the by. I was very excited to get to Vienna, since there are a lot of musically historical locations. But there was another perk of getting to Vienna that I wasn't aware of: it snowed once while we were there! One would think, being in Poland, Romania, etc. in the middle of December, that we would have encountered some kind of snow storm at this point, but it suited the weather to be a tease. Little minx. I finally got one light snow in Vienna, for which I was very grateful. But enough about me, let's talk about...

Beethoven!!! Since my brother named me after him, (or discovered I was named after him...either way), I've had a great deal of interest in him. And then after learning so much about him in school, and also seeing how adorably grumpy he always looks in his pictures, I loved him even more. Really, he's quite an amazing person, and was dedicated to fulfilling God's plan for him, even though he didn't always make the best decisions. This cemetery, Zentralfriedhof, has a large section just for musicians, including Beethoven, Schubert (who should be remembered for any of his work except Die Forelle...stupid trout), and a memorial for Mozart as you see here. The whole cemetery is enormous, about as large as the city center, so thankfully we already knew which entrance to take, and from there found a sign that pointed us in the right direction.
A little outside of inner Vienner (just adding 'r's as the British do), is an area called Heiligenstadt, where Beethoven once lived. They don't know exactly where he lived, but they've set up a museum for him in one of the houses he may have resided in. Pictured here is the Heiligenstadt Testament, the letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers when he realized he was going deaf. Actually, we were fortunate enough to catch Beethoven in the picture too. Erm, he's a bit smaller than he used to be.
This is the church and bell tower in Heiligenstadt...and in fact the bells that Beethoven saw ringing and realized he was going deaf as he couldn't hear them.
Well, yes, of course we went to the Christmas market in Vienna! It was lovely. Actually the whole town was quite lovely, if a bit cold. Cold with no snow is like food with no drink, a mirror with no reflection, a home with no kitty. And we did not get enough snow. Not that I'm whining or anythin'. At least not about the wine.
This is outside the Schonbrunn Palace. And once again, we were more interested in the grounds than in the palace itself. I thought this view of the fountain and the arches behind it was quite lovely. But of course the most beautiful part of the picture is that random chick on the right. I don't know how she got there. Kind of rude to jump into one's picture, really. But isn't she a doll? You should see her boots.
Here's an actual picture of the palace, from the fountain looking back. There's another weird person jumping into our picture. Nice boots.
And last but not least, our random stop. We had a pass on the metro, since some of the sites are quite spread out and it would have taken too long to walk to some of them. This particular time, we only had two stops, but we were tired from walking so much (we still did a fair bit of walking around the city), so we decided to continue on the metro and get off a while later at a random stop. So we did. And were met by this lovely view, which we snapped a few pictures of. We walked for a few minutes, and then it was back to the metro and on to our originally intended stop.

So there you have it. Vienna was quite lovely, but at this point the excitement was mounting, because our next stop was Munich, where we would arrive, spend a night, and then meet up with our family for the first time in five months...

Did ew know...?
Mozart was buried in a common, unmarked grave in the St. Marx cemetery in Vienna. A memorial was much later constructed for him in the musician section of Zentralfriedhof.
Thank you for choosing Lod's Little Tidbits, and have a nice day.