Day 11

After breakfast we took a narrated city tour on a hop-on-hop-off bus. It had two separate routes covering different parts of the city. The second tour we took, we got off at Schönbrunn Palace, which is a former imperial summer residence. The 1,441-room baroque palace is an architectural wonder, and a huge tourist attraction. We decided not to visit the palace because its size overwhelmed us so just walked around the beautiful gardens and admired it from the outside. Our next stop was the two Belvedere palaces, the upper and the lower palace, which were built in the early eighteenth century. There they house the largest collection of Klimt works. We saw their permanent collection with the room of Klimt most famous painting jammed with people. The famous painting “The Kiss” is so popular that they actually put a copy of it in a separate room so people can take pictures of themselves with the painting there -- there is even a sign that says “copy for selfies”. We also saw a special exhibition of Klimt’s erotic drawings inspired by antique art. From Belvedere we walked to the Naschmarket, a very large and attractive outdoor market, and ate obligatory wurst complemented by local beer. After a rest in the hotel, we decided to go to Café Central, which opened in 1876 and was very popular with the intellectual elites of the city. Freud, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Hitler and others frequented it. We had to wait in line to get in. It’s a beautiful building/interior, and they even had a pianist playing all evening. Walking back to the hotel, we got caught in enormous crowds of runners and spectators of tonight’s Vienna night run. There must have been thousands of runners and thousands more people cheering them on. The whole Ring strasse was closed for traffic and full of runners. It was hard to get through anywhere. If it weren’t for the underground, we wouldn’t be able to get back to the hotel.

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