Liptauer (a Austrian spread with cheese and peppers)
Multivitanista (multiviamin juice)
Peprika chips
yummy mediterranean soups (50 cent packs in stores)
Haselnuss creme (off-brand nutella, 1/2 the price and still yummy)
Yesterday I went to Don Giovani. It was ok, I didn't like the design for the opera that much, plus it was really really cold (wind chill in the 40s) so we ended up leaving early again.
Today I went up to school and bought my German textbook. Me and Emily went to Kaisergruft, and then to the Catacombs at St. Stephan's. also to H&M, but neither of us bought anything.
The Kaisergruft was really cool, and that's what all my pictures are of. It's the place where the tombs of the royal family are. All the tombs there are huge and elaborate, and its crazy because without the markers you can't tell the difference between the people buried in 1500 and the last Empress buried in 1989.
Even better though was the Catacombs of St. Stephen's. There's two parts to the catacombs, the newer part which is about 300 years old, and the older part which is about 700 years old. I think. I'm a little sketchy on the facts, cuz the tour was in German, but the guide was nice enough to tell us and some japaneese girls what he was saying after he was done explaining. Also the tour went really fast. And I didn't get to take any pictures. Anyway, so the crazy thing is, they still use the older part, so it's been renovated as recently as 4 years ago, so it looks brand new. All the bishops and higher up clergy in Vienna are still buried there. It's also where the organs of the Hapsburg's are kept after they were embalmed. One of the bottles was leaking, it was pretty gross. Anyway, the new part was amazing!! Everything I ever expected a catacomb to be, it was dark, wet, lit by lanterns on the rough chisled out floor. The new part had two main parts to it. One were these huge empty rooms. It turns out, those rooms used to be piled floor to ceiling with coffins (with people in them). The coffins were just wooden boxes and the people in them weren't embalmed, so evetually they would decay and smell bad. When the rooms were packed full, the smell got so bad it seeped into the church and people stopped coming to mass. So they basically took all the bodies out of the coffins and put the bodies in one room all piled up. We got to see it. You can still see the bodies on top decaying. It's insane. They know the names of everyone buried there, but they didn't know who was who. Next is the plauge victims. You litterally walk up to a hole in the ground and look down, and see a room underneath you pilled up with thousands of bones. There's also a room of skeletons, I'm not sure which kinds, that are piled into what's called a "bone house". They pilled the bones in a very specific pattern to make walls out of them. Aparently it was the prisoners job to not only stack the bones, but to scrape them of the flesh when they were "fresher". Also, right before we left there was a huge stone tomb. Apparently it used to be up near the entrence, but it was moved. It's a huge tomb, but they have no clue who it belongs to because not only is nothing enscribed on it, but the bottom was open so the body decayed.
All in all, it was a slightly creepy, but really fun day.
Me with my tiny mocha that I bought to try and keep me warm. It didn't really work.
The "American Food" stand at Rathaus
Maria Theresa and her husband...whose name I forgot...
(For those of you who don't know, Maria Theresa was a really famous Empress of The Holy Roman Empire, and you should at least know one of her daughters, Marie Antonitte, who isn't buried here. Neither is Franz Ferdinand.)
That huge tomb is Maria Theresa's.
A relief on the side of Maria Theresa's tomb
The top of one of the tombs.
An image of one of the Hapsburgs.
Tombs at Kaisergruft.
The catacombs
Really old flowers on Sissy's tomb. She had tons of flowers, she like Princess Diana to the Austrians, and her image is still all over Vienna.
The hole we climbed out of at the end of the Catacombs tour
