KATIE'S KOMMENTS

August 4… The topic for today is… A description of Vienna

We have been exploring Vienna for almost 3 days now, and have discovered many unique qualities of the city. The following paragraphs describe my feelings about the amazing place.

You enter the city and don't know what to expect. No one in your family has been to famous Vienna before, and you are left with a couple of books and curiosity to discover the city. You walk down the streets with your tiny map and help lead your family to Vienna's most important landmark-St. Stephen's cathedral. You turn a corner and then suddenly the incredible landmark is in front of you. In front of your very eyes is the cathedral whose tall tower can be seen from almost every place in Vienna. You immediately stare upwards at the enormous tower with its beautiful carvings all coming together to form the pointy steeple. There is not a single spot where the stone isn't carved in some way. You feel unwilling to take your eyes off this masterpiece, but soon realize that the entire cathedral is gorgeous. As you look a little further down you see these wonderful mosaic tiles all forming a rainbow like effect. Down lower are more beautiful carvings that form a jagged arch structure all decorated with old statues. They are almost frightening with their medieval look. It's just how you imagined a medieval cathedral…very similar to Disney's version of Notre Dame. It has the frightening gargoyles and giant bell tower. On the ground around the cathedral are tons of horse carriages with groups of people loading into them. You then look away from the cathedral towards the busy streets expecting everyone else to be looking at the masterpiece. To your surprise hardly anyone is focused on it. The majority of the people are just walking down the streets getting groceries and other supplies. The cathedral is just part of their life-they are used to this enormous piece of architecture in front of them.

You and your family then decide to explore the many pedestrian streets branching out from the cathedral. You walk down the wide walkways and notice many shops and grocery stores where citizens are buying daily supplies. You see many public fountains with people all lined up to get a drink on this unbearably hot day. You see street performers, ice cream bikes and puppet stands in between the walkways. It is an amazing scene. Built around and above the shops are old buildings dating back to the medieval and Renaissance times. At the end of the walkways are unusually large dome buildings surrounded by many flowers and fountains. As you walk down the streets you are in a way traveling through time. Hundreds of years of history can be crammed into one little square. It's really interesting to see a very old building such as one from the Renaissance period next to a modern day building from the nineteen hundreds. It was a great way to compare the architecture from these two different periods of time. As you look around you conclude once again that Vienna's citizens don't find these things very exotic as we would in the United States. They are more focused on the modern buildings as you would see everywhere in major US cities. |For this reason you aren't particularly focused on the modern buildings.

Vienna is incredible and in many ways magical. The atmosphere of this large historical city is unforgettable. It's different from every city out there…they are all special in their own ways.