Sunday, February 6th 2011

I spent most of this afternoon walking. Here are some pictures I snapped as I walked...

This is the narrow street that leads to Passauerplatz, and the church of Maria am Gestade...

..and a view looking up as you walk down the street...

As you round the church, there's a small apartment building, with a plaque set in the sidewalk just to the right of the door as you face it...

Vienna's full of unexpected rises as adjoining streets somehow manage to get out of vertical alignment, and you find yourself having to go down a steep flight of steps in order to get to the next street over. Do that from Passauerplatz, and you end up in a little square where I took this photograph...

I don't know what's going on here, but it doesn't look good for the guy in the middle. I have a sense that this piece of statuary is illustrating some well know historical (or mythic) event - but I don't know what it is, and I couldn't spot any kind of plaque to give me a clue. It's hard by the Polish Centre - could that be relevant...?

Here are some more snaps I took as I wandered. For some reason I was focused on plaques today (though not exclusively); there are a lot of those in Vienna....some classical....

...and some more urgent and emphatic..

This city is very proud of its musical heritage. Luckily the composers who lived here seemed to move about a bit, so no building need go without a plaque of some kind. This lucky building claims to have scored Beethoven, though when you look closer it's only built on the site of the building that Ludwig v. lived in....still, the frieze is striking....

If it's not plaques, it's statuary in this town. As somebody once said "Vienna's got all the marble in the world..." (though she said it better than that)...here's a typical example...

There's a marker below on this building close to Passauerplatz. 

My German's not up to a full translation, but I think the gist is that at least one person didn't think that deporting and murdering his neighbours was such a great idea, and tried to do something about it...

This is a view across the street to one of the entrances to a famous Viennese restaurant "Figlmuller"...specialty of the house apparently is veal cutlet, so I won't be going there any time soon (though I hear they can whip up a tasty veggie alternative on request...)

Here's a closer view....