Pictures of Europe!!

Ok, here are the pics. Most of them are at night, since that's the only time I had for sightseeing. I don't know what all the buildings are either.

These are Vienna:

St. Stephen's Cathedral. Nice church but definitely not the coolest cathedral I've seen. We became pretty jaded when we discovered most of it was destroyed in WWII and what exists now is a reconstruction. Boo. Still quite pretty!

The giant organ inside St. Stephens (also a reconstruction of the original).

Looking toward the altar of St. Stephens - mass was going on when we got there. 90% of Austria is Roman Catholic.

The organ and stained glass window.

From the top of St. Stephens. There is an enormous bell up there, too dark to take a picture. We paid 4 Euros to ride this elevator up and look out at the view! From my first trip to Vienna years ago, I remember the catacombs in the basement of the church being pretty cool, but we couldn't go in as they were closed at the time.

Random charming courtyard.

Part of the palace, which goes on forever! All the architecture in Vienna is so grand.

This is actually the Rathaus - a central government building.

The Kunsthistoriche Museum - we spent quite a while in there, it was packed full of cool art. There were ancient Egyptian crypts and statues, Greek and Roman sculptures and paintings from the early to late Renaissance. One of my favorites were these portraits by Arcimboldo who is credited as being, like, the first surrealist. He lived in the 1500s, well before Dali started painting dripping clocks! This one's called Summer:

Below is the Natural History Museum.

Statue of Maria Theresa in the Museums Quarter.

This is the square our hotel was located on:

Ahhh, Paris! Here's a view of La Seine and you can see La Tour Eiffel on the right in the background. I was sooo exhausted and it was about 9:30 pm but I had to go over and see Notre Dame. That was pretty much the only sightseeing I had time for in Paris.

Notre Dame all lit up. It looks totally different than the first time I saw it in the early 90s, before they cleaned it. It was all grey and dirty and now it's white and glowing!

Frieze on the facade of Notre Dame, above the main door.

Some government building:

La Louvre:



No, this is not the rabbit hole to Wonderland, it's an entrance to the Metro!

Oh, I already told you how nice our hotel was... They even had some magic mirror in the bathroom that defogged itself in the middle - no kidding!! It's kinda hard to tell here, but you can see the clear outline of a perfectly defogged square in the center:

And this, believe it or not, is inside the Bank of France! It's called the Golden Room, built in the 1700s:


C'est tout!