Night at the Museums!

This weekend I went to Vienna to see some TA friends and take part in a really cool cultural event called Lange Nacht der Museen (long night of museums). Basically for one 11 Euro ticket you can get into any museum in the whole city, and they’re all open late, until 1 AM. The tickets also get you free rides on all public transportation within the city, including special night lines and shuttles to more remote museums. What a genius idea!! Three other TAs and I started off the night with dinner right in the city center (complete with a glass of Sturm, which is a special wine you can only get at this time of year and it is beyond delicious and I am so sad “Sturmzeit” is almost over). We then proceeded to Museum 1 for the night: Kuenstlerhaus, a modern art museum housed in a gorgeous old building. There was only one exhibit, called “Megacool 4.0,” which was a collection of photographs and visual-media pieces from at least 40 different artists, all portraying the youth of Europe. It was interesting, but mostly strange, and not the cool kind of strange, just the weird kind of strange. There was one room with glass bubbles filled with bizarre artifacts hanging from the ceiling at around the height of my head, and it just made me feel really anxious. We didn’t stay there long.

Gorgeous Stadtpark we walked through before dinner

After getting the classy, cultural stuff out of the way, we embraced our inner child and continued onto the Chocolate Museum, which sits far on the outskirts of the city. When we arrived there was a line out the door and around the corner. You would have thought there was a club opening or something. We were most definitely the oldest people there who were not parents, but the visit was WELL worth it. As soon as we entered, we got a free sample of truffles from a lady wearing a chocolate box as a hat, then followed the line through the “how to make chocolate” exhibit into a room with the world’s longest chestnut-chocolate candy. We got to have a sample piece of this too, and the lady giving out samples must have really liked us because she kept giving us more and more. It was awesome. There was also “chocolate art” on the walls, where people had painted with chocolate, information about chocolate specialties in Austria, a video about how Heindl (the Austrian chocolate company that runs the museum) makes their various types of chocolate, and lots of fun interactive exhibits. At the end there were still more samples, and one of those cut-out-head picture stations that I absolutely love of Emperor Franz Josef and his wife Sisi (the most beloved Austrian symbol). All in all, an awesome museum to visit, even if it was entirely Heindl propaganda. [Effective propaganda, I must admit. I now crave anything and everything Heindl]

 

Any museum that gives me chocolate upon my entrance is a winner in my book

That's one long piece of candy

Next, we matured about 15 years and headed to the Schnaps museum, which was a tiny building in a kind of sketchy area, but again had a line way out the door. We got a tour by the great-great-grandson of the founder, who spoke German about a mile a minute. I had a really hard time understanding him but what I did catch was absolutely hilarious, and super informative. He talked about the different kind of schnapps the company makes, how its made, and what makes the varieties different. Apparently the company recently decided to change the shape of their bottles, but his grandfather was not okay with it, so he has started sabotaging the labels on some of the bottles by putting them on crooked. So if you get a crooked label on your bottle, it’s grandpa’s fault. At the end of the tour we got to sample a shot-sized bit of one of their flavors. I had a hazelnut flavored crème thing and it was pretty good! Again, a super interesting, fun museum, that I probably would never had known about had it not been for this evening!

Our final stop of the night (sadly there was just too much to see and not enough hours in the night!) was the Foltermuseum. Yes, german speakers, your eyes are not deceiving you. This museum was about the history of torture. As if the topic alone wasn’t creepy enough, this museum was situated in an underground bunker from World War 2. Imagine descending stars into an underground torture museum at midnight—yeah. The museum itself was not set up very well, but it was super interesting. There were dioramas/mannequins demonstrating how these torture devices looked and worked, dating from the middle ages to the 1800s. There was also an addition to the exhibit about modern-day torture methods put on by Amnesty International, but by the time we got to that we had had enough. It was definitely an worth-while visit, especially because I would not have gone there randomly on my own.

By the time we were done with torture, it was almost 1 AM, which meant most museums were closing, and we were super exhausted, so we just headed home to one TA’s apartment, where we all spent the night. It was fun to finally see Vienna at night, though, and now that I have a comprehensive list of all the museums in the city, I’m excited to explore a lot more, at much more reasonable hours of the day, of course.