SOME FACTS ABOUT VIENNA

Vienna, the capital of Austria, 2 million inhabitants, is situated on the banks of the Danube. The influx of visitors from all over the world has made Vienna the most popular urban tourist destination in Austria. Austria's climate is generally moderate and mild and reliably follows the four distinct seasons. Average summer temperatures range from 20°C to 30°C, the average winter temperatures are around 0°. Vienna - a romantically imperial city: Vienna is a dream city for anyone with a romantic streak or an interest in history. Sightseeing opportunities are to be found in abundance. Wander along narrow, medieval alleyways or across imperial squares, view Schönbrunn Palace or the Imperial Palace (Hofburg) in the footsteps of Sissi and Emperor Franz Josef, and marvel at the majestic architecture along the Ring boulevard. Be inspired by an atmosphere steeped in history - which also boasts the comforts and infrastructure of a modern city! Vienna - city of culture: Vienna possesses a lively and vast array of cultural attractions. Whether classical or experimental theatre, film or dance festivals, opera or operetta, or exhibitions and concerts - no matter when you come and how long you stay, there is sure to be something exciting for you to discover. Or if your tastes are not quite so culturally refined, then visit one of Vienna's famous coffee houses or traditional wine taverns ("Heurige") and work your way through famous culinary specialities. Wet your appetite! Vienna - city of music: Vienna has been synonymous with music for centuries, and was home to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Johann Strauss. This outstanding musical heritage has been preserved right to the present day. The Wiener Philharmoniker is one of the world's top orchestras, the Vienna Boys' Choir is triumphantly successful wherever it tours, and the Vienna Conservatorium has produced innumerable international award-winners in all musical disciplines. Yet Vienna also boasts a lively scene for young people - if you love music, you are sure to profit from Vienna. Vienna - City of art: Down the centuries, Vienna has always produced and nurtured world-famous artists. The collecting passion of art-loving rulers and monarchs has made Vienna a treasure house par excellence. The Museum of Fine Arts, for instance, is one of the world's largest and most distinguished museums, housing priceless works of art. Art accompanies you wherever you go in Vienna - even some of its underground stations are listed properties (on account of their elegant, ornamental Jugendstil style designed by Otto Wagner)! And Vienna is also uniquely zestful as far as its literature is concerned. After all, where else in the world will you find a city with its own "coffee house literature"?

STREET LIFE IN VIENNA

Day 1: First impressions. Hanging around!

OFF TO VIENNA!

CHOPIN UNIVERSITY.

DO WIDZENIA, POLAND!

NICOLAUS COPERNIKUS

NICOLAUS COPERNIKUS
(/koʊˈpɜrnɪkəs, kə-/) Toghether with Chopin and Madame Curie, another icon of the city (1473 –1543).
He was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at its center.

LAST BREAKFAST OF OUR HOLIDAY IN POLAND

NATIONAL MUSEUM IN WARSAW

Museum of Interiors...

The National Museum in Warsaw was originally founded in 1862 as the Museum of Fine Arts and is currently one of the oldest art museums in the country. After Poland regained its independence in 1918, the National Museum was ascribed a prominent role in the plans for the new state and its capital city of Warsaw, and the Modernist building in which it currently resides was erected in 1927–1938. Today, the National Museum in Warsaw boasts a collection numbering around 830,000 works of art from Poland and abroad, from ancient times to the present including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, coins, as well as utilitarian objects and design.

THE WARSAW RISING MUSEUM



tHE WARSAW RISING MUSEUM

The Warsaw Rising Museum
It was opened on the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of fighting in Warsaw. The Museum is a tribute of Warsaw’s residents to those who fought and died for independent Poland and its free capital. The exhibition depicts fighting and everyday life during the Rising, keeping occupation terror in the background. Complexity of the international situation at the time of the Rising is portrayed, including the post-war years of the Communist regime and the fate of Insurgents in the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). With the total area of more than 3000 m2, 800 exhibition items, approximately 1500 photographs, films and sound recordings, history of the days preceding the Rising is told. Visitors are guided through the subsequent stages of the Rising until the time when the Insurgents left Warsaw. Their further fate is also portrayed.

The second part of the permanent exhibition, opened in May of 2006 in Hall B, presents the story of Allied airdrops. Its highlight is a replica of a Liberator B-24J bomber. Much of the exhibition has been devoted to the Germans and their allies, showing their actions in Warsaw as documented in official texts from the time of the Rising and in private notes. The stories of eye witnesses of the August and September 1944 events are played in Hall B. These recordings came from the audiovisual Spoken History Archive at the Warsaw Rising Museum. A movie theatre shows films about the Rising on a panoramic screen. At the mezzanine gallery various temporary exhibition are displayed. The Museum tower is a special attraction with a view of the Freedom Park and the city of Warsaw.

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A GYM WITH A VIEW!

Trying the hotel gym on the 31st floor.
Laughter!!

JEWISH WARSAW

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At the time Hitler chose to expand Germany’s territories under the odious excuse of providing ‘living space’ for the German people, Warsaw’s Jewish population numbered 350,000 and growing. Neither pogroms nor the occasional boycott of Jewish businesses deterred Jews from settling in the Polish capital and only New York could boast a larger Jewish community. Yet within six years Warsaw’s thriving Jewish scene was all but wiped from the map, with over 90 percent perishing either in the Ghetto or the gas chambers of Treblinka.

Although anti-Semitism was by no means rare Poland was seen as a relative safe haven, and it drew settlers forced into flight by more discriminatory regimes elsewhere. By the inter-war years the Jewish population had made significant contributions to the social, political and cultural fabric of Poland, a contribution that would eventually be extinguished by the monstrous racial policies of the Nazis. When Warsaw fell following a brief yet brutal siege the city’s ancient Jewish population was damned to destruction. By 1940 Jews were forcibly penned into an area that already housed most of the Jewish population. On March 27, 1940, the Judenrat, a Jewish council answerable to the Nazi’s whims, was ordered to build a wall around the ghetto and a resettlement deadline of October 15 was handed to the city’s Jews. Failure to move into the assigned area was punishable by death. Spanning 18 kilometres and enclosing 73 of Warsaw’s 1,800 streets, the area was carved into a ‘small’ and ‘large’ ghetto, the two linked by a wooden bridge standing over ul. Chłodna (E-2). Today an installation titled ‘Footbridge of Memory’ stands at this spot, with optical fibres illuminating the former handrails over the street at night.

From the beginning conditions in the city were harsh; recovered Nazi files show that while ethnic Germans were granted a food allowance totaling 2,613 calories per day, Jews and other groups deemed ‘sub-human’ were expected to survive on 184 calories. Unsurprisingly a black market supported by a smuggling network ran rife, with some 80 percent of the food in the ghetto supplied through illegal means. Still it was not enough and as the noose tightened starvation became the principal enemy. In 1941 over 100,000 died in this way, their bodies often left to rot in the streets. Of the 800 ghettos scattered around the Third Reich Warsaw was the largest and also the deadliest. At its zenith approximately 380,000 residents found themselves squashed into the ghetto, with an average of eight people to a room. Yet amid this sea of suffering a remarkable social scene flourished, as proved by the meticulous ghetto diaries kept by Emanuel Ringelblum. Although murdered by the Nazis in 1944, Ringelblum, an intellectual and social activist, kept volumes of notes documenting the day-to-day life of ghetto inhabitants. It is from his painstaking notes we learn of the soup kitchens and charities that existed, of the musical concerts and cabarets and the fifty or so underground newspapers that circulated amongst the masses.