Our journey began at the Sigmund Freud museum, of course!!
Freud's waiting room, with original furniture
Thought Dad would appreciate this
I love that they gave him this certificate with a drawing of Oedipus and the Sphinx
The room where Freud saw his patients, with some very strange guest art hanging in the center.
Freud family Torah
I looked in the mirror Freud looked in!
Freud and Jung at Clark!
The European Jewish story continued for us at this museum, as the Freuds were of course Jewish and had to flee Nazi Austria. Freud had to pay 1/3 of his estate to get papers to go to London. And then his apartment was used as a holding place for Jews, usually about 10-12 at a time, before those Jews were usually rounded up and shot.
In the museum I read a little bit about how Freud and Einstein were somewhat friends and I was struck for the millionth time that the Nazis made a strategically unsound decision in killing their Jews instead of leveraging them. But a Mengele + Freud team is too horrifying to imagine so...
Freud's trunk!
Then we went to this super bizarre church. It looks pretty normal at the outset, and then...
Concentration Camp inmates at Golgotha???
Native Americans??
Austrian Parliament! It was gorgeous. Much more sensible art.
This guy's posture sucks, though.
Pretty
MORE CHRISTMAS MARKETS! I got a sausage stuffed with cheese. SOrrryyyyyy kashrut.
Vienna is pretty at night!
The hedgehog is my spirit animal.
Pretty
The Mamilla of Vienna
Pretty
NO UNFAIRNESS PAST THIS POINT!
Ironically, and totally unintentionally, Sam and Louisa and I are staying in an Air BnB in a beautiful quiet part of Vienna that... used to be the Jewish ghetto. No escape! No escape!
Another part of what used to be the ghetto.
We went to a famous cake place and got DELICIOUS cake! Chocolate cake, coffee cake, and eggnog cake. And I took this photo of Sam and Louisa which seems to imply their impending engagement. Blondest, most blue-eyed, Jewish babies on the way.
Saint Stephen's church, the hub of Central Vienna
Another view
But Europe wasn't a miserable place just for the Jews! We went into the church catacombs and mingled with the bodies of over 12,000 people! Some rooms with just piles and piles of bones all higgledy-piggledy, and then other rooms with very neatly stacked, sorted bones, like piles of femurs and piles of skulls. And then some rooms that were just huge mass graves of plague victims, which was unusual, since plague bodies were usually disposed of outside the city, but these were lovingly interred underneath the most populated area. It became a smell issue and the catacombs were closed in the late 1700s. Now you can visit!
We went straight from the crypts to lunch, because that's how we roll.
Then we went to the museum of contemporary art! I enjoyed it, especially this Klimt print of Theseus and the Minotaur
I thought the arms looked like they were in prison stripes, but this was pre-war. The Hebrew says "Zion."
Memorial by the Danube to Political (inverted red triangle) and Jewish prisoners in concentration camps
Okay, I SWEAR we didn't seek all these Jewish things out! Everything we just stumbled upon while wandering! It's just funny what you notice when you're away from Israel, I guess.
I thought this guy was creepy, so I sat in his lap, which is probably not a great life strategy.
Beer!
I like how I have an accent when I buy subway tickets here.
Then today we took a train and a bus out of the city and into the HILLS, which were very ALIVE!
And there was much singing.
And much strolling, hand in hand.
And much pondering about what this statue means and what it is doing in the Viennese woods
And there was a cute town!
It was very cute.
Tomorrow Sam and I continue on to Prague!
I wanna see the golem.
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