Mozart Died Here.

Now that I have your attention:

I'm in Vienna, Wien, Vienne, whatever. The train ride was killer. There was this guy with an unspecified odor who decided to sit behind me starting in Passau. Unfortunately, the train was full as of Passau, so I had to put up with it. Nowhere else to go. There were also screaming children. It was delightful.

The train was 30 minutes late, it was raining, and I didn't get a nap on the train. I was hungry and about to eat the next child who makes a noise. And then I saw the city. It was cool.

My first quest was the Hofburg Palace. For those of you who don't know, the Hofburg Palace was the winter residence of the Hapsburgs. The Hapsburgs owned most of Europe in one way or another for about 600 years. The "mother" empire was the Austro-Hungarian, but they had seeds planted in France, Russia, Germany, and England, Spain, everywhere (but then again, who didn't have a cousin who was the king of some other empire- who was also your uncle.) The amount of wealth that this family had was just..ugh...unbelievable. I took a tour of this palace and all I could think about is how...just...absurd...everything is.

And then I started to think about Vienna as it sits in history today. Vienna may be the most important city to the history of Western Civilization. But as for today, what does it mean? Vienna gave birth to the work of Freud, Klimt, Mozart, Beethoven, etc, etc, (all of whom, by the way, were not born there themselves.) After WWI successfully made the Eastern Empire the empire that nobody wanted, Vienna sort of moved to the fray. All of its great thinkers had evacuated and/or been shot by occupying soldiers. It was then a void until its people were united with the Germans, only to become a victim who asked for their victimhood. After the war, there was a doiley curtain around Vienna - maybe an aluminum foil curtain. Perhaps Vienna has not really realized that the Hapsburgs are gone. The city and the country of which it is the capital (What? Vienna isn't in Germany?) have become places of no real importance.

And now, people think that Austria is that place where kangaroos run free.

Even though Vienna has been ranked as the most comfortable standard of living, what, really, does Vienna have to contribute to the world today? Is there an active literary scene? Is there an active art production scene? Have composers composed anything once Schoenberg was given the boot?

Does Vienna even have businesses? Or is it just Disneyland like so much else of the old country?