We have landed in Doha and are preparing for the 14 hour slog home on a fully packed plane. After the 5 hour flight from Vienna and around 5 hours in Doha airport, our journey is rather tiresome.
Limbering up for the long flight home at Hamad International Airport in Doha
After a day seeing fabulously creative art, having a huge traditional Austrian lunch and time playing with illusions, we are now at Vienna airport waiting to depart. Everyone has had a fantastic time and an experience we will all fondly remember!
Waiting to board our flight to Doha at Vienna International Airport
Our yummy lunch restaurant..lots of Wiener schnitzel!
Walking through Stadt Park on our way to lunch
Musos with Strauss
Head sculptures on the Landstrasse Bridge
Inside Hundertwasser Village
This afternoon we visited the Museum of Illusion to have some fun with Science. See what we discovered...
Austrian artist Heinrich Hundertwasser believed in nature and organic architecture. For every tree taken down for a building, a new one must be incorporated into the garden of the buildings. Therefore, Hundertwasser’s architecture is organic in design, devoid of straight lines and has multicoloured surface decoration with glossy tiles. We started the day at the Hundertwasserhaus, an brightly coloured apartment block designed by Hundertwasser, in a district of rectangular buildings in white or beige. The plaza around it has an undulating paved ground to exaggerate the organic. Next door to the apartment building is an arcade of shops also designed by Hundertwasser with cafes and souvenir shops.
The Kunst Haus Wien is the Hundertwasser Art Museum which displays his original paintings, tapestries and a wide variety of his graphic design work including screen prints, woodblocks and etchings. It also had models of his architectural designs and visionary villages. The museum was also designed by Hundertwasser with its undulating tiled floors and graphic black and white patterned tile exterior. Everyone loved the place and bought many things from the gift shop.
Interior stairwell
Bathroom
Our last night in Vienna was spent having fun at the Prater Amusement Park. We went on the 140 year old Ferris wheel, the oldest working one in Europe. Everyone had fun exploring the park and trying out different rides.
View from the top of the ferris wheel
In the afternoon we visited the museum of fine arts or the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Located on the ring road around the inner city, the fine arts museum faces an identical Natural History Museum. Inside the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Klimt has designed artworks on the main stairway and had other works inside the gallery. Most of the works relate to the Old Masters from Italy, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands including Rembrandt, Pieter Brueghel and Archimboldo with his very alternative portraits assembled from food harvests and seasons of the year.
An artist copying the painting style of one of Brueghel’s artworks
Part of Klimt’s stairway
One of Archimboldo’s harvest portraits
The 25,900 year old Venus of Willendorf st the Natural History Museum
Across the road in the Museums Quartier is the Leopold Museum, a gallery of modern and contemporary art. Our late afternoon visit enabled us to see works by the Viennese Secession and a temporary exhibition called ‘Wow’ that certainly lived up to its name with Damien Hirst, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Picasso and whole range of modern masters.
