Viva Vienna

The first thing I noticed about Vienna was the graffiti. Apparently professional urban artists were allowed to go to work on all the vertical surfaces in the city, as all the bridges and walls by the river were adorned with evil clowns, steampunk gasmask-wearing figures, tits, and rabbits.

Vienna isn’t the prettiest city we visited, but I am basing that on the fact that they have rats like most places at home have squirrels. See a small critter dart across the street as you go jogging? Yup, it was a big, nasty rat. See a flattened former critter pancaked in the gutter? Notice the rat tail sticking out of it. Not surprisingly, rats have caused huge problems for Vienna in the past, as attested to by the Plague Column that stands towards the center of the city, and the catacombs full of plague victims below the Stephensdom.

The Catacombs in Vienna, much like the ones in Paris, served as a depository for bones of the dead in a city that was running short on space for cemeteries. Also like Paris, the Catacombs under the Stephensdom are nightmarishly dark in places and the air has a certain mustiness caused by breathing in the dust from old bones. Unlike Paris, the ossuary in Vienna contains mostly plague victims, the piles of their moldering bones visible through metal grates in the stones walls and floors.

If you were lucky enough to be a Hapsburg in Vienna, your earthly remains received much nicer accommodations. The royals were entombed in copper sarcophaguses which are melodramatic enough to pass as set pieces for The Phantom of the Opera. The organs of the royals were also sealed into ornate jars so the soft tissues couldn’t rot their precious desiccating corpses.

If you weren’t a royal, your organs might also get preserved for posterity for completely different reasons. The Museum of Anatomy and Pathology at the Narrenturm made me very uncomfortable. While the wax castes and the organs in jars were created for the education of medical students and therefore the improvement of medical care, they felt side-showish. The freakish specimens were completely disconnected from the fact that they were from made from real people who were living with terrible diseases and probably suffering great mental and physical pain because of it. If the people inhabiting those bodies could afford to see a doctor for whatever passed as medicine in those days, they were curiosities first and people a distant second.

I realize that medical ethics as we know them are a very recent invention, but it still felt wrong not to mention that angle of the history of medicine instead of treating the specimens like a sideshow.

Luckily, most of the excursions weren’t squicky. There were several truly cool things in the Natural History Museum, but my favorite was the oarfish. When I was little, I wanted to be super-rich so I could afford to have a ginormous aquarium in my basement and be the only person in the world who owned an oarfish. I’m sure they make terrible pets, as is typical among things which are over forty feet long, but they look so glamorous with their silvery eel-like bodies and pink crests.

The collection of preserved critters was so extensive, I recognized only a fraction of the species represented, and that isn’t even counting invertebrates or fishes, about which I know practically nothing. Ganges gavials for instance—how come I’ve never heard of them? They’re huge and they look like the unloved bastard child of a swordfish and a crocodile, with a little squarggly thing on the end of their snout for good measure. Something so prehistoric and nightmarish shouldn’t exist, and if it does exist, I should at least know about it. On the other hand, I discovered kakapos. Kakapos are wonderful. I feel like the world is a better place now that I know it has hefty sad-eyed tunnel parrots in it.

I also visited the Spanish Riding School. While I didn’t get a chance to the stallions perform, I did see the in their stalls, and I got to jostle a pack of six year-olds out of the way to play with some Lipizzaner foals. Baby Lipizzaners are born liver chestnut, not greying out until four or five, so they were the scruffiest little foals I’ve ever seen.