Candy and Craig's NEWS: Vienna, Austria, Sunday and Monday, August 5-6, 2012

We are backing up a bit to catch you up. As we said, we arrived in Vienna late Saturday night and crashed. Sunday was an extremely welcome day of rest. It turned out the Vienna 4^th Ward which was an English speaking ward did not meet until 1:30 in the afternoon. As we mentioned before, we found a Laundromat in the morning and did our laundry and then went to church. There were about 110 in attendance. This was the ward that our friends from our student ward in Ann Arbor so many years ago attended. Larry Vincent was doing his doctorate in music performance and I was a counselor to him in an Elder’s Quorum presidency. Larry, Jeannie and family moved to Europe and Larry eventually was the house tenor at the Vienna State Opera. Larry became bishop of this ward probably 15 years ago. When we introduced ourselves and mentioned that we knew the Vincents, many knew them. The current bishop said that Larry was his home teacher and responsible for them be reactivated.

We enjoyed church, visited with several members afterward and walked back to the hotel. We then walked to the park near the hotel and had dinner (Bratwurst and Wienerschnitzel) in the Biergarten in the park. Back to the hotel and we were through for the day.

At this point, we had not really seen any of Vienna and so reserved one more night in our hotel room. Monday morning saw us back in full exploring mode and we covered many of the sites in Vienna. A number of the places we visited did not permit photos inside. One of the highlights was the Gustav Klimt exhibit. This was actually an artist I was somewhat familiar with. Our hotel room was decorated on one wall with a print of one of his photos. His most famous is titled, “The Kiss” and we were fortunate to see it. As you might imagine, we also found a number of churches to visit.

We visited the Hapsburg’s palace and a number of churches. We also saw the portion of the palace where the Spanish Riding School is (where the Lipizzaner horses are). We did not go in as there were no performances then.

In the evening we went to the summer palace on the subway and enjoyed an evening concert of Mozart and Strauss music. We were glad to have taken the extra day.