And going back even further in time...

...I'm finally catching up with posting the photos from my trip at Christmas as well. So, in approximately no particular order, I've got some holiday happy snaps from Vienna. I love Vienna - it's a place where, given sufficient budget (and yes, that is potentially an issue), a tourist with even half an interest in the arts will never run out of cool things to look at. And so, although my interest in the arts (particularly the painting bit of said arts) is probably at most a half an interest, I do love Vienna for its cool museums, classy old palaces, brilliant collections of shiny stuff, and coffee and cake. Oh, the coffee and cake...! If you can persuade the snooty waiters in the cafes to bring any to you, that is - we managed to get ourselves ignored (on the basis, I believe, of looking too touristy) in a cafe for long enough that we just gave up and left, and found somewhere else to eat instead.

The one trap I have to mention regarding Vienna is the shortage of power sockets in the hotel rooms. I don't know if this was just the place we stayed at or if it's representative of a trend of some sort, but we had a single power outlet in the entire room. So, there were three of us taking turns charging laptops, cameras and mobile phones on the one outlet, which is a nice logistical challenge considering the number and variety of power outlets required for all our variously international hardware...

And yes, although I've been there twice now, I do need to go back to Vienna again. We only had 3 days there, which added to the 1 1/2 days I got to spend there a couple of years ago adds up to at least a week short of getting to all the museums I wanted to see. Still haven't made it to MUMOK, the Leopold museum or the Natural History museum, plus a bunch of the others whose names I can't remeber right now and am too lazy to look up on Wikipedia... And of all the ones I've been to, the only real disappointment was the Secession museum - all the good Klimt paintings are actually elsewhere, so in spite of that being the building where he did a bunch of good work, it's full of abject junk (except for the big Klimt frieze in the basement - which is basically worth the price of admission all by itself, I have to say).

So anyway, enough waffling, and on to the pics...