Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Ringstraße Tour and Orgel um Drei

One of the main tours in Wien is the RingStraße Tour. To take this tour, all you have to do is wait at any station along the RingStraße until a yellow Straßenbahn shows up. Then you get on, pay for your ticket, take the headphones, and listen to the audio guide as you travel along. The RingStraße was commissioned by Kaiser Franz Josef and was built over the old city moat. Thus situated, it provides the perfect way to get a quick overview of the Old City of Vienna. It takes about a half hour, and you see many sights. Some of the main ones are the Austrian Parliament Building, the Old Vienna Stock Exchange, the financial center of the city where many banks and insurance companies are based. You will also see the oldest church in Vienna, a cathedral built in the early Romanesque style. There are many other sights on the tour, but I wouldn't want to give everything away :)

Later Wednesday (yes, we're still on Wednesday), we went to an organ concert at three o'clock (hence the name "orgel um drei"). It was in another beautiful cathedral, perhaps the most opulent I'd seen up to this point. The gilded sculptures and moldings were everywhere! Unfortunately, the organist could only use a few of the pipes, because most of the organ needed restored :(  But the music was still quite good.
 

The Old Vienna Stock Exchange


The oldest church in Vienna


Palachinken: A traditional Austro-Hungarian food that we had for lunch on Wednesday


The program for "Orgel um Drei"


The main organ loft in the church where we heard the organ concert. This part of the organ is under restoration. You can see a small amount of the gilding in the church here.

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