Vienna Day 2: Stallions, Anime, Books, and Ballerinas. An eclectic day

A little bit of everything for everyone on our itinerary today.

First off, I woke up completely awake and alert at 2am this morning. Basically, I spent 2 hours hoping to fall back asleep, then two and a half more hours getting much further in my book than I had originally anticipated.

Around 6:30am Jimmy also woke up, and we hit the streets a little before 8am.

Luckily I found a good breakfast spot open. Joseph Brot is a local bakery chain that opens around 7:30 on Sunday mornings. Just in case anyone needs that info in the future.

Breakfast was great, and they had fresh squeezed orange juice which for reason always makes things feel like European to me.

Today we were planning to see some of the sights around the Hoffsburg palace area that are closed on other days. We decided to drop into the box office for Lipizzaner Stallions to see if tickets were still available for their performance. We hadn’t bought tickets ahead as we had originally planned to do something different today, but those plans fell through.

We found that there were still open seats, so we bought our tickets and went off to visit the stateroom of the National Library as it was in the area and we had some time to kill.

On our way to the library we walked through an area where you could see the stable for the stallions, and I got a pic of this cutie chilling out before a performance:

And that is the only pic of a stallion you will see in this blog, because pictures were not allowed during the performance.

When we got to the state room there was already a line waiting for doors to open. We went ahead and bought tickets online while waiting in the actual lines, because who needs more lines? Doing that meant we were some of the first people in. Which I recommend because it didn’t take long for it to get busy.

The library stateroom is this absolute Baroque masterpiece, and it looks a lot like the library from the Beast’s castle in Beauty and the Beast. The architecture is gorgeous, and it’s full of beautiful old books.

The Stateroom was gorgeous to look at, but there wasn’t very much information on the books. There were a couple of display cases with some illuminated pages which were lovely.

One last couples selfie and it was about time to go watch the prancing ponies.

We headed out to the arena where the stallions perform, which is a really beautiful building.

Inside the arena itself was really lovely.

However our seats were really interesting. Frankly the seating here was all kinds of weird. There were seats that looked like they belonged there, and then a whole bunch of seats haphazardly placed. Our seats were folding chairs behind the normal seats. There were random benches one row behind us, and Jimmy and I were across the aisle from each other.

The good news is that we could actually see the horses and riders very well. The bad news, is that it became clear within about 5 minutes that this was not going to be my thing, but I sat in an uncomfortable chair for the rest of the 70min performance.

Not ideal. Honestly, if you know a lot of about horses and horse techniques, you’d probably love it. I know absolutely nothing and it just looked the horses were walking funny. The jumps were cool, but the horses keep their form in a very stiff posture through the performance and it looked even more uncomfortable for them than I felt in my folding chair. They were truly really beautiful, however, and it’s possible that the horses love a good foxtrot.

Oh! Also, in between each performance section a guy wanders around the arena picking up all the horse poo, and everybody claps for him. That was memorable.

Watching other people (and animals) made me hungry, so we wandered over to a place we had walked by the night before for some lunch. Here’s the walk:

And we ended up here:

At Ebi Mini Anime Cafe

I always feel a bit bold getting sushi in a land locked country, but you gotta live, right? It was actually really good and I still feel just fine. It was busy and they turned people away after us, so reservations recommended.

After lunch we were planning to head to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but Jimmy was feeling the need for coffee so we dropped into a cool coffee shop/bookstore/record store for some Viennese hipster fun.

The place was called Phil, and it had great decor and a very friendly vibe.

We also bought a couple of children’s books as gifts. For the past month and a half or so I’ve been working on learning some German, so I’ve been practicing using it here and there. When Jimmy bought the kids’ books (for his niblets), he told the cashier “my wife is learning some German”. The Cashier laughed, assuming the books were for me. Jokes on him, though, because the reading level on them is totally too high for me.

We once more headed on our way, stumbling back into the same Christmas market we had been in before. I tried to get a better pic of the whole market, and got one after the sunset as well. The building that provides the backdrop is the museum.

The museum was really good, and they currently had a Rembrandt exhibit that I thought was extremely well done. It was also just another gorgeous building.

Not sure if you caught the mummified crocodile in there, but it was really treat.

At one point a woman with a very influencer look about asked me to take a pic of her room in a room full of face sculptures. She very carefully placed me, and had me take a burst of photos while she did various poses. I took like 100 pictures.

I actually thought it was a cool idea so I had Jimmy take one of me. He took precisely one. That is why she is an influencer and I am me. Here’s the grand reveal:

If I was wearing all white I’d blend a bit better.

We left the museum and headed to find a traditional Viennese cafe for our coffee and cake, which is a Viennese tradition. Gerstner’s cafe looks great on the outside and was super cute inside, but the wait for a table was too long. We had some evening plans we couldn’t miss.

You can see they had St Nicolas and Krampus candies. More on them later on in the trip.

Our main destination for the evening was the Vienna State Opera House to see a Ballet. Here’s the Opera house from the outside

We were a bit short on time, as the ballet had an early start time of 6pm. Luckily, there’s a great sausage stand right across the street.

If you get a hot dog in Vienna, which they do call a hot dog, you choose your sausage and one condiment. They take half a baguette and drill a hole in the middle, fi it with your condiment, and pop the sausage in the hole.

A woman in front of us asked them to cut the bread in half, but they laughed and said, “this way is better than the American way”.

we went into the opera house and found our seats. No one bothered to warn us of this, but if you get seats in the balcony you have to spend the whole show leaning forward or you can’t see over the banister.