Some cities you fall in love with, others you can only appreciate. Vienna was one of the latter. The streets are lined with one beautiful facade after another, to be sure, but I found it all a bit distant and untouchable.
At one point, unsure of what to do with myself, I walked around the Schönnbrunn Palace grounds and felt quite thoroughly unimpressed. I've been to Versailles, and I'm starting to suspect that one decadent palace is enough for my lifetime.
I just find it difficult to appreciate how fancy some dead guy's life was. The point of half the tourist sites in Europe is "look at how much money these people had and look at the shiny things they made with it!" It's like I've eaten too much candy and now my teeth are numb and I just want to see what ordinary people did and do and how they perceived and interacted with their world.
So I found Vienna to be mostly that: appreciation of long-ago fanciness. In places like this, the fanciness becomes so sacred it begins to oppress the present and stifle life until people are living in the shadow of some other great era.
I love birds. I love how they have absolutely no regard for our precious monuments and statues. It's all just another comfy rock to perch on.
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