Travelling Hopefully

Getting to Schonbrunn Palace required venturing onto Vienna's excellent public transport system.  The Ubahn metro system deposited me so close to the palace not even I could get lost.  There was a little pictorial sign next to my seat on the train telling me who had priority seating.  As near as I can tell I had to give up my seat to fat women with pointy breasts, men kidnapping babies, women with scythes and scary looking pensioners strung out on heroin.  The pictures may have gained something in translation.

So to Schonbrunn.  Hop off the U4 at Schonbrunn station.  Do you see the imposing grey building before you?  That's the erotic cinema.  Turn right, stroll down the road a short way and you are at Schonbrunn.  Another ten or fifteen minutes strolling will bring you to the entrance.  At the entrance is a sign saying "Attention Pickpockets!"  Having got their attention however the sign fails to tell the pickpockets what it wants them to do.

By this time you are probably thinking "Please shut up about the goddam signs and tell us about Schonbrunn" or possibly "I wonder what's on television?".  You may even be wondering if I bothered to go inside.  The answer is "Yes, yes I did".  If I had to find one word to describe Schonbrunn that word would be "big".  If I was feeling expansive I might go with "really really big".  Also yellow.  Schonbrunn is big and yellow.  It is quite the largest yellow thing I have come into physical contact with.  It isn't a bright glaring yellow but rather a soft easy on the eye yellow.  At any sort of a distance the colouration helps the building blur into the background a bit helping to disguise how really big it is.  This is an impressive trick because as I may have mentioned Schonbrunn is very big indeed.

Schonbrunn also has grounds.  Of course it does, what sort of country house doesn't have a garden.  The grounds can best be described as "big".  They are so big you could fit a few more Schonbrunns into them and still have room for a tennis court and possibly a football stadium.  There's a water feature of course, what self respecting garden doesn't have a water feature?  To get a bigger water feature they would have had to build Schonbrunn at the bottom of Niagara Falls.  The grounds have a maze that I wandered around in happily for half an hour or so and a zoo that I didn't visit.

For the record Schonbrunn was built, or rather commissioned, by emperor Leopold I as the Habsburg answer to Versailles which had recently demonstrated exactly what can be done if you want to loot half a continent to build a summer house.  The building was then completely remodelled at the command of Maria Theresia and was used as the Habsburgs summer palace ever since (until 1918).  Schonbrunn is famous for, well, for being Schonbrunn basically.  Emperor Franz Josef I died there in 1916.  He was also born there much earlier, there are some primitive cave paintings which celebrate the event.

Out of Schonbrunn and back along the road to the Ubahn station pausing only to take in the latest offering at the Maria Theresia Memorial Porno Palace and we're heading back towards Vienna.  Actually we never left Vienna.  Schonbrunn may have been in the countryside when it was built but now it is slap bang in the middle of suburban Vienna.  The neighbours must have a hell of a time keeping up with the Joneses.