Viennese Royalty
01.11.2015
14 °C
Vienna is a regal city full of magnificent buildings befitting its past as the heart of the Hapsburg Dynasty and capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is a tower of the 14th century Romanesque cathedral, St. Stephan’s, in the city centre. It was rebuilt in the 1950s after being destroyed in WWII…
When Franz Joseph, the last emperor of Austria, slipped quietly out the back door in 1918 (after screwing up the world with WW1 because his nephew and heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Serbia), he left behind several comfy pads in Vienna. This is the Schloss Schönbrunn – probably the comfiest of all…
This 300 year old pile of 1441 rooms, (and that’s not a typo), started life as a little hunting lodge in the countryside where the Emperor could relax after the frenzy of banquets and balls in the big city and shoot wild boars.The Schloss is one of the most visited palaces in the world and it is impossible to see it without hordes of tourists blocking the view…
Photography is strictly forbidden inside the palace and this is one of the many lavishly decorated state rooms that we cannot show you…
While this is one of the small state dining rooms set for Christmas dinner as it would have been in 1800…
The extensive gardens of Schloss Schönbrunn are open to the public free of charge so it is not surprising that throngs of tourists stroll its many tree-lined avenues…
Our tour of Schönbrunn took us through just forty of the palace rooms leaving more than fourteen hundred unseen. But forty gilded rooms stuffed with opulent furniture and priceless pieces of art was enough. And in the evening we visited another gilded palace – Austria’s State Opera House – for a electric performance by the State Ballet and State Symphony Orchestra...
No photos allowed inside, but Sheila looked regal in the magnificent foyer as we waited to enter… 
Imagine one person had all that and so many people
died or came back never to be the same again. I had a math teacher in Grade 12 who was in WW 1 and he scared me so much as he yelled and threw chalk, books and even a chair one time if you asked him a question. so I got A's and B's for everything else and C- in Math so they pushed me though as they knew what he was like I guess.
by Jean McLaren