Vienna 1/28/10

Woke up at 6:50 AM today to prep for splitting for a three day class trip to Vienna. I watched the rest of The Bourne Identity and started Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade on the bus ride, before we stopped at the Melk Abbey which is on the way to Vienna. Very nice, Baroque structures and lots of photos to be had. Our female guide kept pronouncing “v’s” as “w’s” (“wisit” instead of “visit”). This made me really want to ask her to say “nuclear vessel” but I refrained. Imagine her saying “Valentine’s Day”—now that’s a laugh. The snow covered woods along the way in the bus make me think that this is where that sample pic from Windows XP comes from. Interesting tidbit: Picking up from where I left off in Last Crusade I saw Indy go past Salzburg on the map on the way to grab his dad from the castle on the Austro-Hungarian border. Oddly enough as soon as we got into Vienna I got really tired when one of our professors, Elizabeth, just started to giving a brief tour of the city from the bus. I’ll find out more on the walking tour tomorrow anyway.

After arriving at the Hotel Post we had two hours before the Don Giovanni opera that we were going to see at the Wienert Staatsoper Operahouse. I opted to get dinner at “Happy Noodle” (Asians speaking German is very odd and reminded me of the French Asians in Rush Hour 3): Salmon with rice—okay, cheap food for 3.90 €.

Opera: Can’t say that I’m too much of a fan unless it’s a rock opera in the same vein as “Dracula’s Lament.” I was already tired to begin with and somhow struggled to stay awake until intermission. I really did not care after that as I was zoning out until Katie S. hit me with a paper. Unfortunately by that time I had missed the part where Don Giovanni had be dragged to hell, but whatever. The entire play is in Italian, so there were subtitle screens in front if all the seats, but it takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes to an eternity for the opera singers to express the feelings of one sentence that shows up on the screen. I equate the experience with the last act of the third Lord of the Rings: JUST END ALREADY.

Happy Noodle didn’t completely fill me up so I grabbed McDonald’s on the way back. I realized that I didn’t have any ketchup though and asked the cashier for some. Response: “30 cents.” Nope. This really is a weird country with their policy of no free ketchup and a lack of water tabs on the soda fountains.