What To Do More Of: Slow Weekends In Your Home City!

I have only been on one weekend travel trip so far (although I have a lot more planned for March and April) and I have really enjoyed getting to know my home city so far! I highly recommend planning at least a few weekends of no travel to be able to explore where you are based during your time abroad. It helps to make you feel more at home and helps in getting to know what is around you as well. Vienna is such an amazing city and exploring it these past few weekends has been really nice.

I have spent the past three weekends in Vienna and here are some of the things I have done! 

• I visited the Upper and Lower Belvedere. One of my friends from Mount Holyoke is spending the semester in Prague and came to Vienna for the weekend. I got to spend a few hours catching up with her and walking around the beautiful Palace and seeing some amazing art (including Klimt’s Der Kuss). After we did the Upper Belvedere, she had to head out to make some other plans, but I wandered down to the Lower Belvedere. The Lower Belvedere currently has an exhibition up (through May 25th!) on Slovenian painting 1848-1918 which was stunning. I walked around with my airpods while listening to Claude Debussy as I felt like his music (although he is French) fit the vibes of the stunning artwork I was looking at. If you are studying abroad in Vienna I highly recommend getting the Neue Bundes Museen Card, it is 99 euros for unlimited entry in so many museums including the Upper and Lower Belvedere. 

• I visited the Furniture Museum. I originally visited because they currently have a special exhibition on Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood actress from Vienna who during WWII invented frequency hopping radio that is now the basis for Wi-Fi & Bluetooth (making you reading this post possible!). The special exhibition was small, so I ended up wandering around the main exhibition for a while which consisted largely of furniture used and owned by the Hapsburgs during their reign. It was really interesting to see that as they also had a lot about the maintenance required for the pieces.

• I got dinner with a friend at Pho 84! A tucked away little Vietnamese restaurant in the 7th district, my friend and I had a really nice time. Their menu was vast (like any good Vietnamese restaurant) and very reasonably priced (it was 13 euro for the large noodle bowl I got). It was a lovely way to spend a cold February evening.
• I visited the Albertina Modern and the Kunsthistorisches Museum back to back! With the Neue Bundes Museen Card it allows you to visit so many museums all in one go! Which is really nice because the Albertina Modern did not take me as long to get through as I thought it would and I had more time before I needed to meet up with some friends. I think my favorite part about many museums in Vienna is how beautiful the buildings they are in are. You are able to look and it’s like a continuation of the museum there is so much to see. 

• I went to a thrift shop and a record store! I recently finalized my senior thesis topic to be on the history of female singer-songwriters mainly focused on the 1970s-1990s, so I was very excited to go! I also am a huge fan of CDs in general and love to find cool ones at thrift stores. I found High School Musical, except I am not sure if the songs will be in German or English because on the back of the CD it’s all in German and says “Troy ist ein talentier Basketballspieler!” The record store was my favorite because they had SO MUCH to look at and I could definitely go back and spend another hour (and so much money) in there. I decided to keep my haul at the record slim and only got Pure Heroine by Lorde, Sheryl Crow’s self-titled, and Flood by They Might Be Giants (because despite my parents being huge fans we don’t own Flood on CD). 

I am so happy to have spent the last few weekends getting to explore Vienna and all it has to offer. I feel like I barely even scratched the surface of everything to see! I am also really excited to go explore more of Europe in the next two months. All of my adventures were for the most part on Saturdays and then I would spend my Sundays doing my schoolwork and knitting! I have been working on the Collections Cowl by Meredith Willmott for a few weeks now and am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!