So, last Sunday1 Alyssa and I ventured around the Ringstraße a bit. I’ve got a whole list of things to go see on the Ring, and we wanted to check a couple of them off.2
A historical note: the Ring was constructed under Emperor Franz Joseph II, following the lines of what used to be the city walls. As part of that construction, quite a few other notable buildings were put up, at a scale that makes me assume that Franz Joseph II had figured out the cheat codes for whichever version of Civilization it is that our world is running on.3
Now, without further ado, the pictures:
The first thing we saw was the Rathaus, basically Vienna’s city hall. It’s a lot fancier than any city hall I’ve seen in the US, that’s for sure.4
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but they’ve got some nice inclusive crosswalk signs around the 1st District:
And here’s a close-up of the statue from that last photo, because I remain convinced that this statue is “Naked Man Uppercuts Horse”
The Parlament5 is also a rather impressive building – I quite like the driveway up to it.
And we passed by the Burgtheater, one of the most famous German-speaking theaters in the world.
(This last one was actually taken from the top of the drive at the Parlament, but I wanted to end on it because daaaaang)
- Yes, I know, I’m falling behind, but I do have classes and such to go to sometimes. ↩
- And, y’know, not feel like we were wasting our time in Vienna by sitting around doing homework all day. ↩
- no but seriously the amount of stuff the dude built was ridiculous, where was he getting all this money ↩
- Although Louisiana’s State Capitol is a contender, and while I thought about disqualifying it for being a state capitol, Vienna is technically both a city and a state within the federal structure of Austria, so it’s a fair comparison. ↩
- Yes, autocorrect, that is how it’s spelled. Don’t be anglophilic. ↩