Sissy’s Quarters and Arms and Musical Instruments Museum

the stairs in the museum
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08/03/06 - Day 2 in Vienna

Today we visited Sissy’s quarters and the Arms and Musical instruments museums. While at the Sissy museum, I couldn’t help but be shocked by how disproportionate her dresses/photos looked. When Jenny and Rachel were talking about her dimensions and probable eating disorder I had a very different impression of her than reality. Apparently her 18” waist was not at the cost of flesh elsewhere. She didn’t have that skin-and-bones anorexic appearance. She seemed relatively full-chested and even had normal looking arms. This seemed to us to be a physical impossibility. How could someone who was 5’7” and weighed only 100 lbs look mostly normal except for an 18” waist? Amazing!

I’ve been having a really awesome time in Vienna

armour
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I thought the apartments were neat but somehow less impressive than I expected. The palace exterior was grand and very awesome. However, the inside, while very well furnished and ornate, just didn’t feel IMPERIAL to me. Where I live we have several turn of the century mansions (Newport, RI) because the Robber Barons wanted to build their own palaces. I felt that the imperial furnishings were only slightly more impressive and that was only because of the sheer numbers of things required for a palace. The more I thought about my disappointment the more it occurred to me that the similarities were on purpose. The people that built mansions in America were trying to be royalty and they had enough money to give the appearance of royal possessions.

tracey told me to make a face at the armour
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I’ve been having a really awesome time in Vienna but I often feel that it is just like all the other cities I’ve ever visited. The architecture is different but not utterly foreign. The people my age look pretty much like the kids back home. When I was living in the States and had never been to Europe, I felt that somehow there was some “European-ness” that would be in the air and unmistakable. It hasn’t really been that way at all. I wonder how much of this is due to globalization and being a big city, and how much of it is due to the consistency of Western Culture and even humanity. I think the most interesting thing has been not knowing German but knowing body language. I enjoy people watching and I found I usually could tell what was going on. That is really neat.

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I really enjoyed the armoury museum. When I was younger I used to read all of the DK books on Knights and Armour, etc, that I could get my hands on. It was so neat to finally see real armour and swords and stuff. I actually thought many of the pieces were familiar from reading as a child. Something I thought was interesting was that in the tapestry of the Austrian expelling the Turks they were wearing suits of armor. It made me think of how the Austrians always seemed a little behind the times and I wondered if that was true in this case. Were the Turks more advanced? Was the rest of Europe? Interesting to think about.