[vienna] 1.1. // museum quarter

September 21, 2010

The Japanese tourist strikes back 😀

So I must have gone slightly mad when I decided that I wanted to go to Vienna. But I had been wanting to go there last year and couldn’t make it, so I really wanted to do it this year.

Of course, last minute journey was never cheap, and so was this one. It cost me 62 euros for a return ticket of Linz-Vienna. It was only a nearly 2 hours trip for a one way, so it seemed to me that it had been a total rip off.

But at least I got what I had been wanting for the past year. OK, so I didn’t go to the famous Oberes Belvedere to see Klimt’s famous “The Kiss” or “Adele Bloch-Bauer”, but at least I saw some of his other works (plus some other works by Austrian artists and designers).

And again, I must had been completely mad of going to Vienna on my own without a proper map. I spent around half an hour already at the train station (Wien Westbahnhof) just to find out which way to go to the city centre. To make it worse, the station was under renovation so I completely had no bloody idea which side was the front side. After half an hour of going back and forth and through the station, I finally found out (well more or less, because I just assumed that I found) the front part of the station, and thus I could walk to the Museumpark.

The walk to Museumpark however, was so long that I thought I had taken the wrong route. Luckily I met German students and one of them gave me a map of Vienna. We walked together to Museumpark and then they decided to go to MuMoK (Museum of Modern Art) – the “K” is for Kunst, which means art in German.

I sat for a while outside the museums because I completely had no idea where to go. I wanted to go to all three art museums that stood in front of me, luring me to explore their properties, but I was broke. I didn’t have enough money to go to all of them. I could only afford one.

museum quarter

The museums stood in line according to the art periods: the left one was Leopold museum, a place for “old” art collections, or the Austrian classics. The middle one accommodated the contemporary arts. Current exhibition at that time: Keith Harring and Jean Paul Basquiat. The right one was the MuMok, filled with modern art works. After a long thought and many consideration, which one of them being I had been drilled by modern, new media arts at Ars Electronica, I decided to go to Leopold Museum, to balance the new with the old.

Leopold Museum