church in Vienna

Vienna, Austria

Vienna is the capitol of Austria with a population of over 2 million people. Currency is the euro. 1 euro at last check was equal to $1.10 USD. That is likely to change in the dollar’s current downward spiral. Vienna was home to the world’s first psychologist, Sigmund Freud, and visits by Mozart and Beethoven. Vienna has a dry continental climate with warm summers and cold winters. The temperature varies from winter lows of about 27 degrees F to summer highs of about 79 degrees F. Average annual rainfall is close to 24 inches with July generally the wettest month and February the driest. Its history dates back over 2000 years from early Celtic and Roman settlements to the capitol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria was annexed by Germany during World War 2. It was not part of the Soviet Union, but was occupied by Soviets after World War 2. It remained neutral during the cold war per a 1955 treaty granting its independence and joined the European Union in 1995. Tourist attractions in Vienna include palaces and cathedrals, concerts, museums, historic buildings, an amusement park, and a zoo. And of course the Spanish Riding School and its famous Lipizzan stallions.

building in Vienna

Vienna River Cruise Port

Viking Skirnir docked in Vienna at the main river cruise port near the Imperial Bridge (Reichsbrücke). From there it is a 10-minute walk to the nearest U-Bahn (metro, underground, or subway) station called Vorgartenstraße. This station is on the red line which goes to the city center. Tickets are available in machines at the station for single journey or 24-hour passes that also include busses and trams. Cash may be required for payment.

Viking ships were stacked up to 4 deep with ours nearest land. Just behind it there were more Viking ships, then a row of river cruise boats from many other lines stretching down the side of the river for quite a distance so it is quite the popular port for river cruises. Most are likely just Danube River cruises rather than the voyage all the way from Budapest to Amsterdam that our ship was on.

bus photo

Panoramic Vienna Tour

Viking provides a tour at each port that is included in the price of the cruise. Sometimes there are additional tours people can pay extra for. The included tour for this port was called Panoramic Vienna. It started with a bus ride around town with a guide pointing out major sites that we saw in passing. When the bus tour part of the excursion finished it stopped relatively near the Hofburg palace, though not right at it as we had to walk a bit to get there.

Hofburg Palace

After disembarking the bus everyone followed the guide through town while she talked about some of the things we passed, and a lot of history about the Hapsburgs who ruled Austria for over 600 years.

there are a lot of details near the roof of palace buildings

Viking provided an audio system called Quietvox in which the guide has a unit that broadcasts and everyone else has one to listen. Each guide has a different channel which people on their tour group tune in to so even if you get close to another group from the ship you hear only your own guide unless you switch to a different channel.

horse statue

The Hofburg palace included many buildings and covered quite a large area of the town. One of the statues on the grounds of a rider on a horse was the first horse statue ever built that was balanced on only two of the horse’s hooves without using the tail or anything else to help hold it up.

inside the church

The guided part of the tour ended in a shopping area near a very tall and ornate church, which people were allowed to go inside for free. That was to be the meeting place an hour and a half later for anyone wishing to take the bus back to the ship, which we did not do. Inside the church it had huge stained-glass windows and very ornate details. Looking up and to the back of the church there was an enormous pipe organ sprawling across that entire end of the church on a balcony above the entrance.

pipe organ in the church

Many of the old churches we saw on this trip had the same set-up with large pipe organs on a balcony high above the main floor of the church.

Lipizzan mare and gelding

Near to there we saw several carts with two horses each waiting to pick up passengers. We asked a driver with two white horses if that was where the Lipizzan mares went since the nearby riding school only has stallions. He said his horses were indeed Lipizzans, but that only one of them was a mare, the other being a gelding. First time I’d ever heard of a Lipizzan gelding.

Lipizzan stallion in the courtyard at the Spanish Riding School

While there are far more geldings than stallions among male horses of most breeds it’s just stallions that are ever mentioned pertaining to Lipizzans, though it’s probably just a small number of the breed that actually end up at Vienna’s famous Spanish Riding School. Perhaps gelding is the fate of individuals unable to perform all the difficult maneuvers required of the stallions in the riding school. Of course there have to be mares in a breeding facility or they’d soon run out of stallions to ride. Stallions for the riding school come from the Piber Federal Stud in an Austrian village called Piber.

stallion on the monitor

There was a pay-extra excursion offered on the ship to see the stallions perform, but we did not do any pay-extra excursions, just the ones included with the cruise. We did walk past the facility where we could see some horses in their stalls, and one got walked across a courtyard. There were a couple TV monitors by the walkway that showed stallions performing.

towering church and Christmas market

The Christmas market near the church was not due to open for a bit when we got there so we visited a nearby Lindt chocolate store and a couple souvenir shops while waiting for it to open. Apparently a lot of people must confuse Austria with Australia because a popular item at the souvenir shops appearing on t-shirts, hats, and other things was a sort of street sign like yellow diamond with a silhouette of a kangaroo that said no kangaroos in Austria.

Even the cashier at one of the stores was wearing a t-shirt with that logo. Oddly though it was late November and quite cold outside there were no sweatshirts in any of those shops, just t-shirts. They did sell warm socks, hats, and gloves though.

stall at the market near City Hall

The Christmas market there was bigger than it looked at first glance as the booths wound around a corner. From there we walked to city hall where there was a bigger Christmas market, and we went through another one along the way. Vienna has a lot of Christmas markets.

double carousel at a Christmas market in Vienna, Austria

The Christmas market near city hall had a double-decker carousel in the midst of the many booths selling food, hot drinks, Christmas ornaments, gifts, and other trinkets. A lot of the booths in the various markets had the same items as each other rather than handcrafted things specific to only one booth.

oldest Ferris wheel in the world that is still in operation

The oldest Ferris wheel still in operation is in Vienna at Wurstelprater amusement park about a mile and a half from city hall.  The cabins that you ride in actually look like little cabins and each one holds 6 or 8 people comfortably, though more could squeeze in.

inside the Ferris wheel

The Ferris wheel was built in 1897 in honor of the 50th year of Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign. It stands around 213 feet tall and is located near the entrance to the amusement park. With a diameter of about 200 feet it is nearly as wide as it is tall. Its name is the Weiner Riesenrad. A lot of things in Vienna are called Weiner because in German Weiner means Viennese. It’s also associated with sausage because of wienerwurst, a sausage originating in Vienna.

view from the Ferris wheel

The first pod that stopped in front of us while we waited to get on had tables and chairs in it. Some people got out, then an attendant went in and cleaned off all the tables while the ride sat there. Then it moved on and an ordinary one with a bench in the middle came down, which we were allowed into. It has windows on all 4 sides, of which the middle ones on the longer sides will open for people to take unobstructed photos. The bench is wide enough to for people to sit back to back on both sides. Nobody sat for long though as everyone stood near windows. There were only 5 people in the overly large car so we could move around from one window to another to get photos from different places.

view of the little Christmas market at the park from the wheel

The wheel only goes around once before you have to get off. It’s more about the views and riding the oldest Ferris wheel still in use than it is about actually having a fun ride. It stops frequently and sits in one spot for awhile before moving onto the next one so there is plenty of opportunity for photos from all directions. Once you get to the top there is quite a nice view of the city. There’s also a good view of the amusement park in which the wheel resides. The park has a lot of other rides including several roller coasters and a more traditional Ferris wheel. There’s also some little rides for very small children.

giant pretzel booth

The amusement park is not too far from the port. The weather was cold and winds that were predicted to be quite heavy that afternoon started picking up while we were at the top of the wheel so we didn’t spend a lot of time looking around the booths at that park’s Christmas market before heading back to the ship, though we did stop there long enough to have a hot drink and share a giant soft pretzel. European wheat is different from the wheat in America and not nearly as likely to bother non-celiac people with gluten sensitivities to American wheat.

Christmas decorations on a street in Vienna

Taxis and Ubers were readily available in the touristy areas of Vienna so anyone not wishing to walk from place to place had those options in addition to public transportation.

Copyright My Cruise Stories 2025