Christ, do our feet ever hurt. This might’ve been our fullest day yet, and it’s barely 6PM.

I got up early with the intention of going to the Votivekirche for some pictures, but it was raining fairly hard so I figured I’d wait until tonight. We met the other two downstairs for breakfast (including mimosas!), and hit the bricks by a little after 9:00. First up: the Stephansdom.

It’s a huge gothic church, one of the most recognizable features of the city, with one enormous steeple. We didn’t seem to be able to climb said steeple (there’s construction going on), but we did go down into the catacombs. We started with a mausoleum — nothing special — but then we got to the internal organs (in jars) of the Hapsburgs, and then came the bones. The church is built over a graveyard, so there were rooms filled with bones of the dead, some like cordwood. There was even another room where, during the plague, bodies were just thrown down from the square into a giant pile below. Coooooooool.

From there we headed to the Hofburg, the palace (or, rather, series of palaces) that the Hapsburgs built. We didn’t see all the buildings, but the ones we saw were beautiful. We only went into the Schatzhammer museum where we saw an emerald the size of my fist (2,000-odd carats), a ruby the size of a plum, a bunch of “religious artifacts” and so much gold and jewellery that it became almost mundane.

We stopped long enough to have a coffee and some strudel, then poked around the Augustinekirche for a bit before walking to the Staatsoper (opera house)…which was closed. Apparently they only do tours in the morning. Dang. So we went shopping instead — I got myself a shirt from the Boss store — and had lunch at a little italian place.

Two annoying things about Vienna: the stooges in old clothing who pester you to come see a concerto (we must have been asked 10 times in two days) and Americans who don’t seem to speak at any volume but a low roar.

Anyway…we chose to visit the Belvedere quarter rather than the Schonbrunn Palace. It’s a huge estate in the city where they showed a 50th anniversary celebration of Austrian independence exhibit, along with an art gallery (many Klimts, a few Monets, a Manet, a Van Gogh, a Rodin, etc.). There’s also a very impressive garden between the upper and lower palace.

By this point we were beat, and ready to go home. We tried finding a tram route, but couldn’t. It was too far from a U-bahn station. We walked to the Ringstrasse, but as we got there the trams stopped running because of the pride parade. So we hailed a cab, which was driven by…a madman. This guy, impatient and frustrated by the traffic, drove around queues, reversed down streets, nosed into traffic…it was crazy. In the end he just dropped us off somewhere. While we tried to find our bearings we turned a corner to see…the Votivkirsche, the very church I’d planned to photograph earlier. Funny how fate works.

Anyway, it was about a fifteen minute walk home from there. I tried to get some snacks, but everything’s closed. Nellie had a bath to soothe her achy and blistery feet while I wrote this essay and watched a bit of the Live8 footage. In about half an hour we’ll head out and try to find some food.

Tired.