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chairman_wowAlright, let's get through some more of these photos. It's entirely my fault that there's so many of them, but I just have a thing stained glass windows, you guys. I can stop any time I want to, ok? I just don't want to.
The first few days we spent at this fancy-pants hotel in the countryside a little way outside of Vienna. It has a biotope-pond pool thing with an imperturbable koi carp and a lot of dragon flies and water-striders.
Beethoven wrote his 9th symphony in a nearby town, so they put up a plaque.
Plague pillarrrr. Giving thanks that the plague left the town.
These next pictures are all from the Heiligenkreuz monastery. Most of the pictures in this entry are from Heiligenkreuz, actually, because they were pretty much the only place that allowed photos.
Plague pillar!
Ok, done with stained glass now.
NO WAIT I LIED.
This is an abbot's tomb. The dancing skeleton ladies are there to show that death isn't really that bad. See, they're having fun.
Creepy Pope baby!
This lectern depicts the common Catholic image of Disco-Jesus fighting a hydra.
Monasteries are nice, but the thing with active monasteries is that along with the pretty and impressive architecture and so on comes the slight pervading creepiness of people still locking themselves up in the place for the sake of a man in the sky. Not that it didn't look like a nice place to live, and it's their choice and all, but Catholicism is always a little bit creepy, even at the best of times.
Let's talk about the things Austrians love:
Austrians really enjoy Mozart.
And Sissi*.
And creepy old men, for some reason.
These two are from an 18th century mansion we visited, which pretended to be a medieval knight's castle, because some prince was really into knights and took a lot of furniture and fittings from old castles and monasteries. It was all a bit silly, but probably the only old castle still being used entirely for its original purpose: to show people around and show off the old things.
Next up: Schloss Schönbrunn, which gets an entry all to itself, even though we weren't allowed to take pictures inside.
*The only things I knew about Empress Elisabeth before this trip (when I did some reading on Wiki) were that she was the main character of this TV series (which looks just as bad as I remember thinking it was back when I was 10 years old and all the girls in my 5th grade class were addicted to it), and that she was killed by being stabbed between the ribs with a file, which I'm pretty sure I remembered because I thought it would dismay all the girls in my 5th grade class.
The first few days we spent at this fancy-pants hotel in the countryside a little way outside of Vienna. It has a biotope-pond pool thing with an imperturbable koi carp and a lot of dragon flies and water-striders.
Beethoven wrote his 9th symphony in a nearby town, so they put up a plaque.
Plague pillarrrr. Giving thanks that the plague left the town.
These next pictures are all from the Heiligenkreuz monastery. Most of the pictures in this entry are from Heiligenkreuz, actually, because they were pretty much the only place that allowed photos.
Plague pillar!
Ok, done with stained glass now.
NO WAIT I LIED.
This is an abbot's tomb. The dancing skeleton ladies are there to show that death isn't really that bad. See, they're having fun.
Creepy Pope baby!
This lectern depicts the common Catholic image of Disco-Jesus fighting a hydra.
Monasteries are nice, but the thing with active monasteries is that along with the pretty and impressive architecture and so on comes the slight pervading creepiness of people still locking themselves up in the place for the sake of a man in the sky. Not that it didn't look like a nice place to live, and it's their choice and all, but Catholicism is always a little bit creepy, even at the best of times.
Let's talk about the things Austrians love:
Austrians really enjoy Mozart.
And Sissi*.
And creepy old men, for some reason.
These two are from an 18th century mansion we visited, which pretended to be a medieval knight's castle, because some prince was really into knights and took a lot of furniture and fittings from old castles and monasteries. It was all a bit silly, but probably the only old castle still being used entirely for its original purpose: to show people around and show off the old things.
Next up: Schloss Schönbrunn, which gets an entry all to itself, even though we weren't allowed to take pictures inside.
*The only things I knew about Empress Elisabeth before this trip (when I did some reading on Wiki) were that she was the main character of this TV series (which looks just as bad as I remember thinking it was back when I was 10 years old and all the girls in my 5th grade class were addicted to it), and that she was killed by being stabbed between the ribs with a file, which I'm pretty sure I remembered because I thought it would dismay all the girls in my 5th grade class.