Showing posts with label Austria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Austria. Show all posts

Sunday, March 31, 2013

In the Wienerwald

With these writings I try and stay away from the "take this train to get to this place" kind of travel writing you can find nearly everywhere. Why bother with that, if you really want to find out how to get someplace there are tons of sources available on the internet.
That being said, I also realize that there are a whole lot of places that are a bit less traveled and might take a little work to find. I think my trip to Hinterbrühl outside of Vienna is such a place. Rather than only write about my experience in Hinterbrühl, I'm going to tell you how I traveled there too.
My main goal was to visit Seegrotte, Europe's largest subterranean lake. I guess you could call it a man-made lake, since it is in an old gypsum mine and there would not have been space for the water if people had not removed the gypsum. Also, there was some sort of explosion or something that caused the mine to flood. There were too many man-made causes for this lake to call it "natural."
The Seegrotte was also a manufacturing facility for the Heinkel HE 162 Salamander Volksjäger jet fighter. The Germans used the mine to build parts of the plane and assembled it someplace else. The Allies tried to bomb the facility, but didn't have any success. When the Germans left they destroyed it and it was restored to be a tourist attraction. Tours run all year long.
I started from Vienna and my first step was to make my way to the Bahnhof Meidling train station and catch an S-Bahn commuter train to Mödling (pronounced something like moodling). The ticket cost me €2, not bad for a 15 minute ride out of town. The S-Bahn trains to Mödling leave about every half hour or so for most of the day. Once you get to the station you will want to look for the bus stops for the 364 or 365 bus to Hinterbrühl Seegrotte. The bus stops are the closest ones to the station and have the numbers of the busses that stop there right at the top. You buy a ticket from the bus driver, so don't worry about trying to get one from the ticket counter. The guys at the counter don't speak any English anyway, so it was a bit of a struggle for me to figure out I could just pay the driver on the bus. The bus ticket is €2.
I honestly don't remember how many stops it is from the Mödling station to the Hinterbrühl Seegrotte bus stop, but the signs for the busses will tell you, just count. The busses aren't like the ones in Prague which announce the name of each stop before you get to it, so if you are like me and forgot to count how many stops you were suppose to look for you need to keep an eye out. The trip takes about 15 minutes or so and the name of the stop is Seegrotte. When you get off the bus you will be in Hinterbrühl.
After you get off the bus keep walking in the same direction as the bus. You will cross a river and come to a street going right. There will be the Seegrotte Cafe across the street from you. Turn right on that street and walk a little ways and you will see the Seegrotte entrance on the left.
Tickets for the tour, there is no other way to get in, are €9 which is a pretty good deal. The tour takes about 45 minutes and includes a boat ride on the lake at the end. My guide gave the tour in German and English, he was a nice guy.
The film The Three Musketeers shot a few scenes in Seegrotte and they seem to be pretty proud of it. A few of the set pieces are still there.
If you go in the summer time take a jacket. The temperature in the mine is a consistant 9 degrees Celsius, which was nice for me because it was warmer than the snowy Hinterbrühl day outside. Another thing to take along is something to wipe your camera lens with. The mine is fairly humid and it can fog up a lens pretty fast. I had a few problems with this and finally removed my haze filter and kept wiping my lens down with the bag for my sunglasses.


This is the entrance to the mine. You have to walk about 500 meters down this to get into the place. Be warned the ceiling for this tunnel is about six feet high, so if you're like me you will have to duck for the walk in. After you get into the mine though the ceiling opens up.


Here is a shot of the tunnel from inside the mine. Looks pretty much like an old drift mine. There really isn't anything ground breaking about it, pun completely intended.


One of the first things you get to see is a mock-up display of a miner from the early 1900s. It was just too cheesy not to photograph. I'm also not certain miners in the early 1900s wore hard hats, I think what they had was more like baseball caps you could attach a lantern to.


The next thing you can peek at is the miner's gallery. This is where they took their breaks and stuff. I don't know why they just didn't go outside, the gallery is only about 600 meters from the exit. This room, we were told, is a balmy 12 degrees Celsius all the time.


There is a lot more to this mine than you will be allowed to see on the tour. It's for the best really, getting lost in a mine is no pic-nik and is really quite dangerous. Still it was neat to see all these other doors into darkness.


The mine includes a shrine gallery with shrines to the patron saint of miners as well as a few memorials to deceased miners. As you can see the roof opens up quite a bit after you get inside.


Here is a better photo of one of the shrines.


This is the mine's chapel. It's called Santa Barbara's Tunnel and is pretty large. According to the tour guide there are services here from time to time which are lit entirely by candle light. Seems like it would be pretty cool to see.


Before you get to the lake there is a display showing some of the parts for the HE 162. There is also this old model of one on a stick.


This isn't the lake. This is actually a small pond about 14 meters above where the lake is. They have it well lit and it's pretty so here's a photo.


To get to the lake you have to descend these stairs. The rails in the middle were used to haul the fuselage for the planes out. The rails didn't exist before the Germans arrived to make planes. At the end of the stairs there you can see the lake. If you look at the top of the photo you can see the HE 162 display. It gives you a good sense of how far below, or not far below the lake is.


When you first get to the lake you are greeted by this set piece from the Three Musketeers movie. It's a movie I have not seen, but I trust them. Why would the guide lie about that?


You get on a boat and the guide steams you around the lake. It's a pretty short trip, but still pretty cool. The boat is electric and doesn't make any noise, which is nice. The guide turns lights on and off as you travel along and is very nice to point out the "beautiful water reflections." The reflections make the water seem a lot deeper than it is and at first it was a menacing site until you figured out what it was. The guide also mentioned several times that the level of the water is 1.2 meters. No one should drown if they accidentally fall in. I bet you'd get hypothermia in a heartbeat though.


Here you can see the factory floor under the water. It's just like any other flat, concrete factory floor. It is still pretty impressive to think airplane were made in here.

After the tour I wandered around the town for a little while and took a look at just how small it is. There really isn't much there. It is in the heart of the Vienna Woods though and is quite pretty. It also seems there aren't a whole lot of poor people living in the village. After my wander I decided to visit the Seegrotte Cafe. This was a great idea. I had a HUGE latte and the largest plate of schnitzel on earth for something like €10. It was a really nice cafe with a great staff. There were locals coming and going the whole time I was there and I'm guessing it was pretty much the only game in town. People would just pop in, have a coffee or a beer and split. It was a really homey feeling place.
From the cafe it's a sort walk down the road you walked in on to get back to the bus stop. I timed it just right, completely by accident, and bus 364 pulled up right when I got there. I paid the driver €2 again and then caught the train back to Vienna for €2 and still had time for more sightseeing in town.
So there you have it: an easy trip to a great part of the country and the whole thing, transport, meal and tour cost less than €30. I think there is some good hiking around the Vienna woods in the summer, so if you go then you could make a whole day of it.

Friday, March 29, 2013

Back to Vienna

Well, I had to make a trip back to Vienna to collect my visa from the Czech embassy. They can't just mail it to me because it has to be attached to an empty page in my passport. I must say it is interesting, probably because I've never had a visa before. Basically, my passport now looks like it has two identification pages. The visa page is laid out the same at the main id page and has all the same computer type codes. I will have a complete post on how you can get your own Czech visa if you want, so be on the lookout for an "International Scavenger Hunt" blog post.
For this trip I visited the Vienna military history museum, or Heeresgeschichtliches Museum for short. I don't expect you to try and type that into Google, so I've made the name a link so you can get more information if you want. Everyone who knows me knows I love my military history. I frequently wow people at parties by explaining that the Battle of Letey Gulf was the last time anyone "crossed the T." I've made that a link as well, because I want you to keep reading without falling asleep.
As a military history buff the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum didn't disappoint. Granted, it's mostly about Austrian military history. There are various displays about other countries, but they are there to show the adversaries. The World War II section was particularly impressive and not like any of the glorious "look how we kicked Jerry's ass" museum exhibits you see in the U.S.
I want to start at the top with the museum, even though it covers the history of the Austrian military from somewhere in the 1600 to about 1945 there was one section that blew me away. The Franz Ferdinand exhibit really impressed me to no end.

Maybe it's because I like cars and I like history, but this is one of the most impressive cars I've ever seen in my entire life. This is THE actual car Ferdinand was assassinated in. You could try to argue that seeing the limo JFK was riding in at Dealey Plaza is almost as profound, but you would be wrong. Countless millions died in World War I which resulted from what happened in this car. Very few cars have been involved in events that changed world history like this one. There is even a bullet hole in it, look above the rear wheel. For the record, the Associated Press defines the time of assassination as when a person is mortally wounded, even if they die later. Lincoln was assassinated at the Ford's Theatre, even though he did not die there. I really can not think of a more historically-important automobile. I invite you to write a comment if you can think of one.
The exhibit didn't end with the car. Why would it?

Here is Ferdinand's blood-stained uniform. It might be vomit, or a combination; I've been in Prague a while so I've seen a lot of both on clothing. I'm pretty sure it's blood. The hole next to the collar on the left side of the photo, Ferdinand's right, is where the fatal bullet entered. I'm pretty sure that is what the sign said. I took a photo of it and will translate it and make an edit if I have to. To me, the car and the uniform were worth twice the €6 price of admission to see.

Then you have three of the guns used in the assassination and the grenades the killers really wanted to use, they are up there at the top. If you're under 18 and or haven't taken a world history class; do yourself a favor and click this link it will explain everything.
Honestly, the only things I think I've ever seen that are more historically significant are the Magna Carta, Declaration of Independence and The Constitution and they are all in the same place. Cut me some slack though, I've on been in Europe for five months or so. I know there are way more important things to see. I would have to say this is right up there with Bull Run for me, but a little more intense. In one instant, in the back seat of this car, the world changed forever. I know some parents who can tell their children that too, but it's not really the same.

Here's a close-up of that bullet hole, in case you missed it.
Since we're pretty close with Frans Ferdinand and everything I'll jump right in to some of the WWII display. It was in a seperate wing of the museum and included some cool stuff I didn't photograph like a Kublewagon (Volkswagen Thing) and an Air Force Will'y Jeep, which was a good restoration but not as cool as Little Audie.

In my last Wien post I showed photos of Flaktum, or flack towers. Here is a flack cannon, a baby one. Big brother is a bit more intimidating:

Imagine those towers topped with these nasty pieces of AAA darkening the sky with flak and shaking the ground firing as fast as possible. If you look behind the large cannon, you will see a example of the damage flack can do to an aircraft.

This is a half-track and it's just really cool. I'm not sure why it has or needs a front wheel, but I'm also not a 1930's military vehicle engineer. I first saw one of these in the film Saving Private Ryan and thought it was awesome. That is why I took this picture.

This photo doesn't really do a great job of showing the almost certain possibility of the driver's clothing getting caught in the track mechanism but it does do a great job of showing that the guy driving it was seated tightly between two huge fuel-tank bombs. I also get the impression that having some of the controls between your legs made things difficult. There were also foot controls for something. Still, I really just included the half-track photos because I think the vehicle is cool.

This is an Enigma Machine. It was the Nazi's coding device. Really, it's a laptop running just one program. No one was able to break the codes this thing created until one of these machines was captured. I'm pretty sure the film U-571 was all about how the U.S. captured a German U-boat carrying one of these things and changed the course of the war. The Heeresgeschichtliches Museum has two of these things. Maybe they use them to send secret messages during parties. They are both complete with instructions.

And what WWII museum exhibit is complete without a Nazi paper lantern? Pretty much all of them but the one at the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum as far as I've seen.

Do the Fatherland proud and hang your Nazi lantern high. I don't know, it's just weird I think. Maybe they sent them to Japan. Many people associate paper lanterns with Asian cultures.
From about 1750 on there were a lot of guns. Actually, they had some muskets from the 1600s and they looked like they were just beastly to use. The person shooting them actually had to have a stand for the front of the musket to rest on. I'm not surprised, the things look like they weighted 50 pounds at least. I know one guy who could shoulder fire one, but he will remain nameless.

This is a detail photo of the "sights" from an early 1700s flintlock "sniper" long gun. I first tried to call it a rifle, but this was a smooth-bore gun. Soldiers of today have it easy compared to this. I honestly don't know weather you look through it, or put in on the Pope's head. I think part of the size was to help protect the shooter from the huge flash that came when you fired the gun, but I really can't say. I can imagine using it though and I know I'd never hit a dang thing. I never hit anything anyway and that is with good, modern sights.

Then I saw this bad boy and fell in love. This is a 38 "kaliber" pistol. That's right, not .38 caliber but 38 kaliber with no period. The sign underneath this gun showed only question marks where a date was supposed to be. It should be sometime in the late 1700s. Think Revolutionary War time frame. Understand, this isn't a blunderbuss where you take the nearest thing with some mass and cram it in the barrel. This is a calibered weapon, somebody actually made a lead ball to shove in this thing. People in the U.S. who don't like guns say the Founding Fathers meant muskets when they wrote the Second Amendment. Well, this sucker was made right around that time, so the Founding Fathers must have meant something like this. Aside from the fact that it must take at minimum 500 grains of powder to fire I want one. This makes a .50 caliber handgun look like a toy for young girls.

You can see the rest of the display here. Those other guns look downright tame compared to that 38. I bet you'd never need to shoot it. I think just brandishing this thing would be enough to scare pretty much anyone away. Of course with how short it is I bet you couldn't hit anything farther than 10 feet away. And reloading, come on if you hit a person with this, you don't need to reload. When your bullet is the size of a person's fist it has some stopping power.

There were "modern" guns in the museum also. Everything Austrian military seems to have stopped about 1945. I wonder why. This was one of the coolest gun exhibits I've seen. It is one of the first repeating rifles used by the Austrian Army, sometime around 1898. I don't think I've ever seen and actual cutaway of a gun like this before. They even cut the bullet in half, although that is black powder in there and this type of bullet didn't use that, but anyway. I suppose sawing bullets in half is a bit dangerous and you have to make due. Safety over accuracy is something I can get behind here.

Not to put too fine a point on it (pun completely intended) but humans have been killing each other with pointy things for a lot longer than they have been with guns. These are bayonets from the late 1700s because when it takes 2 minutes to reload your gun you don't want to be caught defenseless. These things are nasty and most likely killed more people than the guns they were attached to. They aren't the worst blades in the museum. There was actually a whole display of Turkish weapons. Evidently the Austrians and the Ottomans weren't friends.

See, I told you there were nastier things. These spears were labeled something "spiken." All I know is I would not want to be at the business end of one of these. If you survived a hit from one of these it must have taken months to recover.

The Heeresgeschichtliches Museum claims to have the largest collection of cannons in the world. Most of them are outside and it was cold and they were in a cage thing and whatever I got lazy and didn't photograph them. I was at the museum for four hours, cut me some slack. I did however photograph this mortar. It's almost a cannon and it was inside where it was warm. As a side note, check out that floor. It was creaky as all get out, but really cool.

If you're going to hurl lead from a tube you might also want to have something you can hurl from a man. These are early grenades. You took a hollow ball made of iron, or glass there in the back; filled it with powder, shoved a wick in it and hurled it at your foes, or dropped it on the ground and ran like hell. I think I read somewhere that more grenadiers were killed by their own weapons than by enemies. After seeing these I know why.
That is pretty much it for the important things I have to say about the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum. If you're interested I've been pasting Heeresgeschichtliches Museum into the text, because it really is a bastard to type. Anyway here are some fun photos I took too. The tank garden was closed until next week, bummer.

 

There were a lot of dolls in the museum. Some where small, some large. I liked these. It also turns out Austria had a navy. From the exhibit they had a navy for a long time. I still can't figure out why a landlocked nation needs a navy, but I'm a small-picture kind of guy. There was an exhibit of mannequins wearing Austrian navy uniforms and I really liked the light. It was a bit eerie, so I will leave you with that.

 

Sunday, February 24, 2013

Second Impressions of Vienna

So, I did get some time to wander around in Vienna and see that there is a pretty big difference between Vienna and Prague. This is of course revolutionary information I'm sure.
There isn't quite as much graffiti. There is not a complete lack of graffiti, just not as much. It seems that the graffiti artists try to take at least a little more time with it as well.


And then there is of course the temporary graffiti afforded by a prolonged snowfall. The snow started falling Saturday evening during my visit and it was still going strong when I left Sunday evening. It made the city quite pretty. It also made the city quite cold, as did the wind. Prague is not as windy and so it doesn't feel as cold as Vienna despite the two cities being pretty close in temperature.

Vienna is a whole lot bigger than Prague. It is a lot more spread out and I think just generally a larger city as far as population is concerned. I'll have to check Wikipedia to be sure. Even though it is a larger city the public transportation is pretty easy to figure out and use effectively. I never had any moments where I was completely lost and had no clue how to get to where I wanted to go.

Another part of being bigger is that the monuments seem to be a lot bigger. Giant statues of people on horses and such dot the area around the city center. Like this statue of some guy outside the National Library.


Over on the right side of the photo is the Vienna City Hall. It's a pretty impressive building and the one behind the coolest skating rink I've ever seen that I talked about in my last post. Then there is this giant statue of another guy on a horse in front of the Albertina art museum.


While the statue of the guy on the horse is pretty impressive I was much more taken with the metal and glass domes behind it. I would love to have a flat with such an impressive architectural feature and you can even tell there is some sort of room about the lighted area of the dome on the left, cool.

I must say, there is a more diverse mix of architectural styles in Vienna than is Prague. That is not to say that there is no diversity in Prague, there is just more of it in Vienna. For example this old U-Bahn entrance.


There is also this thing called the Hundertwasser House, which is a block of flats designed by an artist. I stopped by but I wasn't very happy with the photos I took so I just stuck that link back there. It was interesting to see for sure and maybe when I go back I will get a tour of it. From the reading it doesn't look like a place I would want to live in, but it was still interesting to see. Here's hoping I get better photos next time.

Another pretty cool architectural discovery I made I found while wandering around. I saw these imposing towers and they led me to a park. I'm not really sure if they count as architectural features, but I'm going to say they do. Limited expertise be damned.



These are Flacktum or flack towers. Definitely not something you're going to see in the states, as far as I know. Sure there are old gun emplacements from WWII, mostly on the west coast and they are generally hard to find or recognize because they have been destroyed. The closest thing I remember to these is the canon emplacement on Compo Beach I use to play on as a child. I imagine, judging from the graffiti, that there is substantially more broken glass around these Flacktum than the guns at Compo. 
These give quite a different feeling than a Civil War battlefield or even the canons at Compo. These give a much more impending feeling of recency. I could even imagine, as I wandered through the desolate snow-covered park, this massive expanse of land protected from citizens by Nazi sentries to keep these towers safe as deadly weapons for protection against an allied bomber strike. It was morbid and peaceful at the same time. But all you had to do was turn around to see that this was a beautiful park now enjoyed by many.


I doubt very much that in 1940 whatever that a woman would be allowed to stop and read her book while she walked her baby through this park. 

The other buildings you can't miss in Vienna are the churches. They are pretty much every where. That is not to say that there isn't a church on every corner in Prague, there is. For the most part though, in Prague, the churches match the surrounding architecture and don't really stick out quite so much. You'd be hard pressed to find something like St. Rupert's Church in Prague. 


I was just walking along in a fairly modern part of the city, near Swedenplatz, and BOOM there was the oldest church in the city. You can see it sticks out from the surrounding buildings and some of the other buildings are really quite close. 

I was walking around another corner and stumbled upon St. Mary on the Strand. 


The other difference is that there is a pretty conscious effort to restore the churches. Granted most of them have some sort of insane fire in their history and have been in a constant state of construction for something like 800 years, but what I noticed what that they were doing a lot of work to clean them now. I suppose 800 years of soot and dirt adds up. Actually, I don't suppose it. I know it after seeing the difference between the cleaned parts of the churches and the parts the workers have yet to get to.



As you can see, the Votive Church looks pretty good all cleaned up. They still have work to do and it looks like this particular phase of the operation is brought to you by Mazda. I personally think it's pretty smart to sell space on the protective covering as a bilboard. I mean shoot, you're looking at the advertisement now. 

Some churches are a bit newer and don't need a thorough cleaning just yet, like St. Charles' Church.


Still, it is nice to imagine an army of Viennese craftsmen packing what I like to think are specialized electric tooth brushes attacking a church coated with nearly 1000 years of schmutz and making it look like new. Like they are doing to St. Stephen's Cathedral in the center of the city. 


You can still see some of the dirt that needs cleaning. You can also see all the carriages  they seemed like a popular way to get around. I imagine if you've seen the film Amadeus too many times you could really be into riding in one of these. If that is your bag, there are usually a few dozen lined up at Stephensplatz to accommodate you.

This is the only church I went inside, kind of. So I can't tell you if they have restored the "new church" smell also. I didn't even really go inside St. Stephen's I climbed the bell tower to check out the view. I'm a sucker for a good climb up a bell tower. And St. Stephen's didn't disappoint. It was of course achieved by marching up an incredibly small circular staircase for something like 300 feet, like every other ancient bell tower. There must have been a lot of dizzy priests.


At least this one had an alcove were people could pass each other. There was even a bell chamber you could stop in before going all the way to the top. The bell chamber was very handy for allowing annoying, drunken German-speaking teenagers to get far ahead of you.


There were even quite a few windows where you could check your progress on the march up. This one displays two things I finding more and more common. If there is something you can put a padlock on to profess your undying love to someone people will most likely do that. And the other thing, if you can toss some coin someplace people will do that too. You can even see some Czech Koruna in this photo. I spotted at least one 2Kc piece, which is essentially worthless in a place where they use the Euro.

But the view was worth the hike. This photo allows you to see the varied building styles in Stephensplatz.


So there you have it, other than my description of the Fool's Tower. I can't wait to get back and see some more of the city. It really is quite large. I also hope it is a bit warmer next time.