Saturday evening was "Lange Nacht der Wiener Stadtwerke" in Vienna...which is an annual event...and is basically this super well organized open house of all the city works around Vienna, and from 6pm to 1am all of these plants and buildings are open with various programs and activities you can check out all over the city, and they provide free shuttle buses to everything! Hopefully I'll be better at explaining this through pictures...but until I was enjoying it all Saturday night I really had very little concept of what I was in for.
So after wandering around outdoor markets and festivals on Saturday, my friend Liz said that some of her work friends were meeting up to go to this Lange Nacht thing, and perhaps we should go check it out. The meeting point was the Rathaus, so we met up there, got our free little bread snack and a brochure, and mapped out the evening. All three shuttle bus routes started at the Rathaus, but we decided that in the interest of time we'd just stick to one route with the most locations we were interested in and make our way around that.
We actually chose the route that would take us eventually to the central cemetery...which we figured would be particularly cool since this was the night with the super moon...but we had to wait for it to get sufficiently dark out, so we stopped a couple places along the way.
First up was the Strassenbahnmuseum!!! I love transit museums and have always been really fascinated with how cities' public transit systems come about and evolve...I will definitely have to go back here at some point to actually read things, since we really just wandered around a bit and were distracted by everything else going on...but I was certainly not disappointed.
The old smoking cars didn't have real windows, just tarps to pull down in the rain, so they're basically just outdoors...pretty smart idea.
The entire museum is basically in a Strassenbahn depot building, and they're all still sitting on tracks. We saw several old trams out later running the loop the shuttle bus was running, although sadly we didn't wait around to ride in one. Outside they had a tram and a bus for kids to play on and see all the controls...and we might have all gone in them as well...
Liz bravely getting her face painted...it was still pretty early in the evening and this guy was really eager to get some customers...
It's a tram!
Another outdoor activity at the museum was to take a ride in this cherry picker...which they use to do maintenance work on the cables for the Strassenbahn lines...so of course we had to try that. How often do you get a ride in a cherry picker???
We went pretty high actually...ha...and the basket part of that thing isn't exactly stable, so we're a bunch of adults nervously laughing and hanging on tightly to the edges...I think the controller guy was having some fun freaking us out.
In order to dodge a quick rainstorm, we ducked back inside the cover of the museum, although in this section they had a line of booths set up with all sorts of fun things about trams in movies and history of trams etc. I have a pretty sweet tram wall calendar now that was in fairly high demand. Also...at these stops...there is free food and drinks set out for people to enjoy. So we had a nice sandwich for dinner while we waited for the rain to stop.
Our next location was a Wien Energie stop. I'm not entirely clear on what happens here exactly...but it's something about the gas and energy lines in the city. They had all sorts of tours and demonstrations, including several in their covered parking area...they had bicycles you could ride, go karts, electric sports cars you could ride in, and segways to try.
We all opted for the segways...although you can see a blurry guy in a bike going past in the picture...I had never been on a segway before, so that was very fun...I'd definitely be up for trying one of these longer segway tours at some point. Plus here they had cotton candy for you while you waited in line, so we were pretty sugar rushed by the time we got on them.
It's now about 10:30pm, so we decide that it is now dark enough for our last stop to the cemetery. I'm still amazed how quickly the night goes, and I wonder how many stops people actually make...we were out from about 6:15 to 12:45, so I feel like we got a pretty full evening out of all this and we only stopped at 3 or 4 places...
The gate to Zentralfriedhof
Even at the cemetery they had stations of activities! Stone carving, casket making, and a place where you could look down into a grave they dug...that was about as far as we decided to go.
Along the main path, and some side paths...they had these little torches on the ground to light the way somewhat. They're almost like little flares in the ground, except they have an actual flame, and for whatever reason they would flare up occasionally just as you were walking past one and people would freak out and run to the other side of the path. It definitely felt like the creepiest Halloween ever, except it was May...
Plus the super moon...and the flare in the corner...
Brahms
Beethoven
This is the church in the middle of the cemetery, it is a really gorgeous building, but it looked really ominous just sitting there as the only thing properly lit anywhere around...we did go inside for a minute though.
They had these train tours that went around the cemetery, which was really cool, but slightly bizarre. It's almost like a Disney ride train, except you just wander around through old graves while some sort of weird opera music plays on the speakers. Totally worth it though.
Our last stop in the cemetery was a walking tour to Falco's grave, which was one of the station activities. By now it is almost midnight, and when you get to his grave, it is the only thing lit up, and it is blasting his music...so you're walking in almost complete darkness until you get there, but all of the sudden 80s pop rock music starts getting closer...again bizarre.
From there we headed back on a shuttle bus to the main gate of the cemetery to start heading home...
But across the street was a sign for the pet cemetery so we figured we should go check that out too...the woman there told us all about some of the people who have pets buried here...and just how eccentric some of them are...one guy hired someone to sing Ave Maria at the funeral for his cat...
You can have a fairly serious funeral here...they have this viewing room/chapel and everything...seems a bit excessive...but an interesting end to our evening.
This whole night was by far one of the coolest and most bizarre things I have done, but I can't wait to check out the other "Lange Nacht" nights...they have one for churches coming up soon...and one for museums, and one for music, and several others throughout the year.
No comments:
Post a Comment