Walking through Vienna

After WWII, there was a lot of reconstruction in Vienna. But the town fathers decided they wanted to rebuild in a classical style. And so, we have an Austrian Parliament building modeled on a building you should recognize—- the Parthenon!!

Here’s the view from the top of arch looking past Athena…. Interestingly, this building is actually smaller than city hall… which you can see here at the end of the street with the spires….

A walk through old Vienna is very pleasant indeed, with its narrow winding cobblestones streets and pedestrian walk ways….

The buildings are closely packed together, but there are no skyscrapers in the old city, unless you count the towering church spires…

There are tons of interesting little shops, for example this one is built into the back of a church!

Here is the silversmith’s shop…..

Here’s a shop with current antiques!

And a glassworks shop…

And the Buchhandlung of course, a real bookshop. which are not disappearing like they are in the U.s.

Here’s a beautiful little handmade frame shop where we bought a couple of small frames for Yuliya…
You can even buy beautifully framed paintings here…. In case you are wondering that’s a painting of the Chateau de Chilion, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

Ah oh….. its a Magnum Bar sign……! Ice Cream alert….

And old Jewish shops in the Jewish quarter..

At some point we got tired and stopped at the olde Greek restaurant for lunch….

The sign says at the top ‘There is only today…’ just above the list of the special in special sauce of course. Implied message— ‘Carpe diem’ or in this case carpe the carp!’ Of course there were choices other than Greek food, after all, this is Austria…

Like in the U.S. there are restaurants that feature special beverages, in this case the famous Viennese beer— Gosser, which has a very clever commercial— ‘Gut, besser, Gosser’ which means ‘there’s good, there’s better, and there’ Gosser’.

There are lots of monuments and statues in this city, for example, here is Gutenburg, the inventor of the printing press…

We could have stopped to watch the rehearsal of a drama troupe performing in a small building which looks like it belongs at the circus….

We did stop to see the plague monument, more accurately the monument erected to thank God that Vienna survived the plague……

Though tempted, we did not stop at the Bakery….but boy it smelled good!

There were philosophical signs to ponder….

But in many ways, it was pleasant just to look up at the beautiful blue sky, and thank God for another wonderful day in Vienna……