Beautiful Vienna

After all of our summer camps and the busy summer ministry are done we usually get some time to recharge and take a vacation.  This year we headed home for Rebecca's sister's wedding which is this weekend.  On the way over, we stopped in for a short visit in Vienna, Austria.  We met up with and stayed with our friend Carolin who was an intern with H2H last year.

Vienna is a really beautiful city with many palaces, churches and buildings with amazing architecture.  This is one of the three imperial palaces there that we saw.  Inside was an art museum with lots of classical paintings.

At the palaces the landscaping is always immaculate with flowers, shrubs and fountains.

This is the banquet hall in another one of the palaces, unbelievably big and so ornate and rich.

In the old part of town there was limited car traffic and lots of horse drawn carriages.

There were also many well kept parks.

We also had the good fortune of going to a symphony orchestra concert where they played Mozart and Strauss pieces.  It was really fun and we enjoyed hearing such classical music in the place that it was composed and first played.  That is one of the neat things about touring different places in Europe, there is so much history there.

This is one of the main churches in town, St. Stevens.  I climbed the 343 steps of the bell tower to get a great view of the whole city.

The inside was amazing and we got to do something that we've never done before, going down into the catacombs underneath the church.  It started off as just some normal looking rooms that were nicely finished but as we went further they got darker and older feeling.  Then we were able to look inside some rooms and see the bones and old rotting coffins.  It was kind of creepy knowing that these were real bones and skulls that used to belong to real people.

In the streets there were many statues and monuments like this one.

This is the altar inside of another church that we visited.

This is the state opera house all lit up at night.

This is one of the palaces that we visited and it looked really cool at night.

You can tell that Vienna takes a lot of pride in their city and loves to show off the beauty of their historical buildings.  This is their town hall.

We stayed with Carolin and she was a very good hostess, arranging all sorts of good breads and cheeses and cooking for us the first night after we arrived.

The following nights we went out to eat and had some delicious Indian, Thai, and Austrian food.

We really had a good time in Vienna and with Carolin.  It is always fun to see a new city especially one as nice and full of things to do as Vienna.