The Herbst Family: Another wonderful day in Vienna

Beautiful flower shops were everywhere and we saw a lot of "locals" carrying wrapped fresh flowers to take home.

A view of Stephan's Platz in Vienna

After touring the city, I felt that Vienna is unique in that it is the city of old, mixed with new. With the old style, there were buildings that the Turks created and a few with Gothic and Baroque influence, but mostly my favorites had the traditional Roman and Greek architecture. Because of WWII, some of the old buildings were destroyed and new or modern buildings were built in their spot to replace those that had to be demolished.

To commemorate the city's deliverance from the Great Plague and waves of the disease, the Viennese erected this monument. Like many other countries, Austria lost over 76,000 residents in Vienna alone from the Black Plague in 1679.

Another stop for gellato

We saw a few of these around this city..it's called a "FAXI", like a taxi, but built more like a bike and the driver pedals you around town.

One of the most famous sites in Vienna, St. Stephan's Cathedral.

A statue outside the front of St. Stephan's

One of the many pulpits in St. Stephan's Church

Side view of the top half of St. Stephan's Church. One of the few Gothic architecture buildings here

Artwork engraved in stone depicting Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane in St. Stephan's.

This is kind-of erie, but on our tour of the cathedral...they took us downstairs into the catacombs. We weren't allowed to take pictures of this, but I found this on-line and copied on to my blog. We saw tombs and caskets of Bishops and other important church leaders from 1300's to present. But, as this picture shows... we saw several "windows" of these. This is where they buried the dead of those who were "worthy to be buried on church grounds" in the community grave for those that died from the Black Plague in the 1600's. At first, it was hard to believe they were real skeletons...it almost looked fake, like something you would see at Disneyland on the Pirates of Caribbean ride. Only there were bones as far as I could see with and several massive graves. We were told on our tour, that they stopped counting how many and after a few years stopped burying them under the cold church because people stopped coming to church because of the smell. Yikes!