Hmm, another weekend in Vienna.
It was a really great weekend though.
On Fri, I went to the Opera and saw The Magic Flute. First off, I have to say I met a really nice girl that I talked to while in line (for 2 hours). The only reason I mention her is because she wins for coolest accent so far. She's originally from Canada, but moved to Ireland, so she had a weird Irish/Canadian mix going on. It was really cool. The Opera was amazing. The techinical aspects- lighting, sets, costumes, absolutly floored me. It was beautiful, and very ingeniously done. And the actors weren't bad either, especially Papagena. I loved her. Then, after the opera I went to the Klimt Villa for Webster Works Worldwide. Fri night was in Vienna "The Long Night of Museums", which meant you could buy a ticket and get into any museum in Vienna, and they would be open from 6pm-1am. So it was a neat idea. Webster in STL has this community service day where classes are canceled and you can sign up to go to all these different service projects. So for that day here, you could go work at the Klimt Villa for long night of museums. So I went, and it was really fun. I got to see the villa for free, and the other people working were really nice, and I got a ton of free stuff. So it was great.
On Sat, Me and Michelle went to St. Michael's Crypt and the Central Cemetary (Zentralfriedhof). How do I explain the central cemetary....The Viennese are known to have this fascination almost with death, so the central cemetary is really important to them. They write songs about it, we listened to one in German class called "Long Live the Central Cemetary". On All Soul's day, it's packed with people. We are encourgaged to go see it by our teachers. So while it may seem weird we went to visit a cemetary, it's completely normal here.
St. Michael's Crypt was amazing. They wouldn't let us take pictures. But it was incredibly creepy. The crypt was shut down hundreds of years ago for smelling up the church, as crypts usually are. It was divided into sections of nobles, and people with money. Even money can't buy you a noble's spot. They told us a cute little story about Maria Teresa's nanny, and how Maria Teresa demanded she be buried with the Hapsburgs, so her body is there but her heart was buried here with her family. And then came the creepy stuff. Some of the smaller rooms have a brick floor, but the main room has a dirt floor with a weird, almost linear, random design. It turns out, the floor is almost 2 meters taller than it used to be because everytime the crypt filled up, they would take all the coffins and throw them away, and take the bone, throw them on the floor, and then add a new layer of dirt. So those weird line in the dirt...bones. Next is the coffins there. They're wooden, and painted. It's actually really cool to get to see the creepy death inspired old paintings, of flowers and skulls and angles. However, some of the coffins, for whatever reason, are missing their lids. So you can see the decaying bodies in them. Now, there are all sorts of fans and lights everywhere down here, it actually looks like a basement being remodeled with all the extention cords and work equitment, but the point is it's very well lit and very cold, so the bodies are almost mummifed and not rotting, but you can see everything. You can see their clothes, the high hells that they wore, the dresses, the jackets. On all of their faces the jaw has dropped so it looks like they're screaming. They actually have faces and not just skulls, because they still have skin, gray mummiedfied skin, but it's there. You could even see their hair. On their arms and hands, you see a mix of skin, and tendons, and bone. And to top it all off, they're right there in front of you. No glass, no rope, in fact it's so crowed I was actually trying to NOT touch the coffin because I was being pushed towards it. It was crazy.
After the Crypt we headed to the cemetary. However, the Zentralfriedhof is really really huge. If you compare it on a map, it's bigger than the entire downtown/inner city portion of Vienna. And Vienna is huge. So by the time we got there we were tired, and after about half an hour we had barely made it past the outskirts of the cemetary, but we decided to go home.
On Sun Michelle and I had another new fun experience. Some of the girls wanted to get together and have dinner and a movie night, so me and Michelle decided to run by the store and pic up some things. Being a Sun, all the stores were closed. So we went to Sigmund Frued Park, where they're always a lot of univerisity kids hanging out, and asked for directions to an open grocery store. We actually found it easily, but when we got there, it was insane. It was the most crowded I've ever seen any store. You could literally hardley walk in there. And to make it worse, they were trying to re-stock everything that had run out at the same time. So if this many people need to shop on Sun, why aren't more stores open?
Ok, that was my weekend. I'm out.


Before there was a crypt, they buried people right under the floor in the Church, so the church is full of grave markers.

And you sit on top of them.

St. Micheal's Church is weird because it's been added onto so many times, so there's a variety of styles in one little church.








I really really loved the art deco tombstones. Also, it was kinda creepy how many german names I recognized. (Hoffman, Weisskopf, Reicher..)



These mini-masoluem things were huge and everywhere.