Riddle No.2

I decided to look through photos for some more "fragment" riddles, so here comes No.2 between Vienna posts. Looking forward to guesses!

Zauberhafte Wien - Teil 2.1 Vienna the beautiful, part 2.1 - Stephansdom

This is Stephansdom - St Stephan's Cathedral - the main cathedral of Vienna. Mozart was married here, here he and his wife Constance Weber christened two of their sons, and the font is still there (well, actually I have pictures from inside and it will be logical to put them up here even if I went inside only several days after).

Here:

The font

The ceiling and windows near the font part of the cathedral

Statue des heiligen Muttergottes. The legend says she is protector of all servants: once a servant girl was accused of stealing some jewellery from her mistress and came here to seek help. She praed hard and Helige maria made it so that the real culprit was found and the girl was free from all accusations.

A bit of stained glass. Not so detailed and fascinating as in Cologne, but also beautiful in a simplier way

This part of decoration goes back to middle ages, but I am not sure to name the date without looking it up.


And the general interior.

Photos taken not on the same day, I came here more than once:

1) just seen the exterior

2) went inside, but it was time of the mass

3) went inside with an audioguide and saw all the details slowly and carefully. Had a little incident: I asked the guy at the entrance for a ticket and audioguide in German, speaking German of ourse, and the reply was: "Wir haben Fuerungen in 20 verschiedenen Sprachen. Wollen Sie es vielleicht in einer anderen Sprache?" - "We have tours in 20 different languages. Maybe, you need some other language? "Nein", said I. And got my German audioguide which I understood perfectly. When I related this story to Isabella, my Austrian friend she said: "Das ist gemein - du sprichst super Deutsch" - "That's mean - you speak super German!". But still that hurt a little that time in the Cathedral- I have an accent after all. However, spending a succesful holiday there proves I was a competent user of German after all (and a happy one - the more I read and speak it, the more I love it, so eine shcoene Sprache! - it's a beautiful language whatever other people may think!)

The cathedral tiled roof in the evening sun

Zauberhafte Wien - Vienna the beautiful, Teil 1 - Part1

This was the official name of the tour. But the first sights were not exactly impressive as there was a big building site nearby (no photos of that, however!).

Kirche Maria am Segen. I later heard that it does not have many visitors now. Initially it was built for working class people living nearby, but later on there came quite a lot of non-Christian immigrants came to live in the district, so the church was not needed that much anymore. But the building is still impressive.

A kind of saturday Gothic youth parade at shopping street Mariahiferstrasse, taken especially for a "gothic" friend Zhenya, who gave up reading this long ago...

No more worthy fotos on the first (half)day

Summary what I and my new companiom did: went walking to Westbahnhof - West Train Station - then to Maria am Segen - then along some other street - trying to tune my mobile phone (but in vain) - then discovered Mariahilferstrasse (had been previously told that there was a shopping street called Mariahilferstrasse near the hotel) - went along - dropped into a couple of shops - I saw a bookshop (talia.at, German books in abundance!!!), bought there a couple of books (actually, 4) - went back - still could not tune the phone - went back to the station - bought a phone card - finally called home - lost myself in press&more(a stationbookhop which was perfectly good for me and it had an ENORMOUS choice of magazines - up to those for doll and teddy bear lovers and GeoWissen and similar had all the issues! and that a station shop) - made up my mind to see Hofburg the next day - read up a bit of the travel guide - felt dizzy and dropped to sleep. My only companion was a lady in her 50s from Moscow, with whom we later get on very well. Guess what: she's a language teacher at a Moscow Academy, so we have that language&cultureeducation background in common! She does not speak German, however, her major is French and she just kept gushing about her wonderful Paris trip last year :-)