Excitement and Such

Wow! The last few days have been incredible! Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with my blogging. I’ve been busy having an amazing time.

Where did I leave off? Well I got my new glasses. They are very nice! I’m still getting used to the new look. I really loved my old ones, but these will do. They look good.

We arrived in Vienna just in time to check in, move in, and get ourselves to the music theater for our Mozart concert. The concert was quite enjoyable. It was a very good welcome to Vienna. It was definitely for the tourists, featuring a collection of Mozart greatest hits, but the musicians were phenomenal, and the low-key nature of the performance meant that the beautiful period costumes were not distracting.

After the concert, mom got the best hot dog in the whole world. We also checked out our very lively neighborhood.

Tuesday morning we were abruptly awoken by a jackhammer on our wall. Turns out a construction crew was working on the spot above my head, and had made our balcony their headquarters. Mom was pissed and half-asleep. I, however, saw an opportunity for a challenging confrontation, and was out the door with my shoes on before I had fully woken up. I got the hotel manager to make them stop, and went back to bed. Yay me! Later, when Mom brought the manager upstairs to see the worker’s home base on our balcony, said manager took €50 off our bill.

After we woke up for the second time, we took the tram around the main part of the city, and went to the Kunsthistoriches Museum. The museum was in a super impressive Hapsburg palace-type building, and the collection was awesome. We checked out lots of beautiful paintings by all sorts of famous dead guys. Then we headed to the coolest museum ever.

The Haus Der Musik was phenomenal! We had planned to check it out because it was a music museum in a music city, and I am a music major, but we ended up spending the entire afternoon running around the museum having soooo much fun! Mom says it’s like a cross between the hands-on Exploritorium experience and my music history textbook…”but, like, brought to life, you know?”

The first floor was dedicated to the Vienna Philharmonic. It had all sorts of cool music relics from famous people, like Strauss, Toscanini, Brahms, Bruckner, and Bernstein.

The second floor was super interactive. It taught us all about how sound and music work. There was physics and physiology and anatomy and music theory and singing and running around and making funny noises and having crazy stuff played into our ears and stuff I can’t even describe. Mom and I created this video for your viewing pleasure and general enlightenment:


The third floor was about the great masters of Viennese music tradition. There were rooms for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, and Mahler, plus a room for Berg, Schönberg, and Webern. Each room was totally different and very cool. There were all sorts of relics and portraits and factoids. We had a free audio guide, which was very informative and interesting.

The fourth floor was the “futuresphere.” It featured the so-called “Brain Opera”—more interactive stuff with cool MIT technology. Similar to the 2nd floor.

In general, we were super impressed with how well the museum appealed to everyone. As a student of music history, I was afraid the museum would be too dumbed-down for me and I would find it boring. It was, in fact, the opposite. I learned a lot, and had tons of fun. The museum also works well for people who lack any musical background at all. It even has fun interactive games for children (and grownups). The layout of the exhibits is stunning and unique. Best museum ever.

After our day of museum-ing, we were pooped. We took a roundabout way home via tram and metro, and got to see more of the city… and people… at rush hour. We chilled at the hotel for a bit and watched True Blood (we <3 that show lots). Then we got dinner. We had yummy street food. Mmmm! Then we took a walk along the river and saw amazing street art. It was like a graffiti museum. There were canvasses and lighting and everything. Very cool. This piece made us laugh lots:


Today, we got up bright and early. Really early. See, my phone has been an hour off this whole trip, and I have had to remember to set my alarm an hour late. It’s worked fine. Today I forgot. We woke up at 5:15. But it was OK, cuz we got a very early start to a VERY long drive.

We drove into the Alps in the morning light. It was effing incredible! Holy crap! Those mountains are legit. For a long time we were driving directly towards a very impressive, matterhorn-esque peak. As we approached Salzburg, the scenery really began to resemble The Sound of Music.

We stopped in Salzburg. It was one of the most beautiful cities we’d ever seen, but the 95-degree extreme humidity was not at all beautiful. We took in some fantastic sites, visited Mozart’s birthplace, and got the hell back into our air-conditioned car.

Next we stopped in Munich. Our GPS found us a spot with lots of stuff going on in it. We saw some sweet buildings, parks, museums, etc. from the outside. The city looks very cool. We got a cold drink at a café (I had a mango-chili smoothie… so good!) and ran into an expatriate from Oberlin, Ohio at a tourist shop. Then back to the AC and the gorgeous highway.

Our drive was truly exquisite! I cannot even describe or capture in photographs how beautiful the mountains, villages, fields, and forests were. Somewhere in the greater-Frankfurt area, we hit a massive lightening storm. Though the road conditions were a bit sketchy, the storm was still impressive. I put on a great playlist of songs about sunshine and happiness. As we came out of the storm, our breath was taken away by the most beautiful sunset ever… which lasted for hours as we drove north-west. Oh em gee!

Mom says, “truly among the most beautiful drives I have ever experienced.” Which is pretty legit. She’s done lots of traveling.

We stopped for dinner at a rest stop just after Cologne. I am typing right now from the car. I will probably edit/add to this before I post it online. We should be arriving at my apartment in Amsterdam around 1-ish.

Wow.

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Update from Amsterdam: TIRED. SLEEP!