Hello oh-oh. Vienna Calling.

That is the Embassy of the Republic of Angola decked out for Christmas

Vienna Calling!  Actually, Vienna called.  And I answered.  So here I am in the Hapsburg capital of Old Europe.

(For some reason, I have more songs about Vienna on the music player on phone than maybe any other city.  London and L.A. might be up there, too, but Vienna is bizarrely well-represented.)

I rode the rails out of Sopron, Hungary, for the short trip (1 hour, 20 minutes), to Vienna Hauptbahnhof, and soon was at my hotel.

The Hotel Zur Wiener Staatstoper, which translates to -- and yes it does translate to something seriously -- the Hotel of the Viennese State Opera.  Again, an opera-adjacent hotel.  If the Opera has a fat lady singing, she's not singing in this room:

Cozy.  The bathroom is so small I couldn't get in there to get a decent picture.  The bed is a decent size, tucked in a corner of the room and, really, that's all that really counts.

The room may be small and the hotel very old-school, but the staff is friendly.  The location is extremely convenient, near the palaces and museums and all the historic churches.  And the Opera.  I'll see all of that tomorrow.  I wandered around the immediate neighborhood trying to get my bearings:

The hotel is inside the Ringstrasse, the ring road that surrounds the historic core of Old Vienna.  They replaced the old city walls with a boulevard, at some point after they stopped fearing an Ottoman Turk invasion.

It was late afternoon.  The rain had briefly let up.

So people were out on the shopping drag.

The buildings look historic.  Not sure if there's any history behind this one, but it looks like there ought to be.

This is the beautiful Katholische Franziskanerkirche, the Franciscan church:

It doesn't look like much from the outside, but the inside is fantastic.  I took pictures.

In the extremely dark interior, my hand was not steady enough to get any really nice crisp pictures.

These were the two best.  The church is two blocks away.  I'll try again tomorrow.

The shopping street got more Christmas looking after dark, with the "icicle" style lighting being lit.

Lots of interesting churches with lots of statuary.  You could spend a full day wandering amongst just the ones within a short walk of the Hotel Zur Wiener Staatsoper.

Perhaps I will.