25 February 2008

Greetings From Vienna - City of Statues

One of the things that I love about Europe is the prolific use of statues. They can be monuments that might just be a bust of some random person that you might miss unless you walk into it or big huge monuments that you can only miss if you are actually blind. Like this monument in the Museum Quarter to Maria Theresa.



The Opera House comes replete with several statues whose significance, other than decorative, escape me.



Then there are the random carvings that decorate buildings. Most of these places are now used for modern purposes, guest houses, cafes, shops, etc but I wonder what they used to be? All the old buildings are just so beautiful to begin with, maybe it was just the style to slap a few busts onto a building regardless of the building's intended purpose?







Other than a brief excursion earlier today I'm pretty confined to my hotel so i can be online and work and convince my boss that I should be allowed to go back to Belgrade tomorrow so to remind myself that I am in Vienna I'm watching a movie on my computer. And what else would I watch except Amadeus? Absolutely fantastic movie but I still cannot watch the bit at the beginning when the old Salieri cuts his throat in an attempted suicide...that part always freaked me out when I was a kid and I'm still not over it apparently. Poor Salieri, his music really wasn't bad, he just had the misfortune to try to be a composer in the same era as Mozart and his contemporaries.





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