Fun Fun Fun Funicular Away Part II: Tbilisi Fun

The city view at the end of the funicular ride

Tbilisi is one of the world's cities with a funicular. Which means, of course, I have to go for a ride.

The funicular station was a little more than a one-mile walk from my hotel. Uphill. Funiculars, being on steep inclines, tend not to be found in the flatlands, although it was a flat walk to the Baku funicular. This was not a flat walk.

The number 120 there means that it is the age of the Tbilisi funicular. It started operations in 1905, which is, I believe, coincidentally, the year of the founding of Las Vegas. Eventual year 1905.

And though the funicular is 120 years old, these are not 120-year-old cars. These are very modern, but not too much so.

There actually was a funicular driver in the vehicle. I'm not sure how much actual driving was required. But I have rode in more than a few driverless funiculars.

I do prefer the traditional driver-ed funiculars.

This is a two-stop funicular, which means there was an intermediate stop halfway up the hillside. The first stop was the Mtatsminda Pantheon, a final residence from many prominent national heroes and artists. I almost typed "of the past," but given the fact that everyone residing in a cemetery or mausoleum is "of the past" -- we do not inter the living -- at least not yet -- so I edited out the "of the past" as a repetitive redundancy. Mtatsminda Pantheon:

At the summit, right next door to the upper funicular station, was the terminus for the cable car line that started near the Rustaveli Metro Station. In Tbilisi, they also call "cable cars" ropeways.

I first saw the word "ropeway" and envisioned one of the awful nightmarish rope bridges that swing wildly over ravines where with each step you risk plunging 10,000 feet below into the bottom of gorge. This is not that kind of ropeway. I would be willing to ride this sort of ropeway. If there had been no funicular to or from Mtatsminda Park.

Here is a view of the ropeway line:

Mtatsminda Park is an amusement park with carnival games and old-fashioned rides such as bumper cars (which were not operational at the time I was at the park) or one of those rides where people sitting on swings go round and round in circles and somehow the rapid speed of the circling is supposed to make it better,

The park also had what I am guessing was a single-service ride 

It's an elephant with a big red basket on its back. What child would not want to take a ride in one of these. Looks much more fun that swings going in circles at a fast speed.

There also was a ferris wheel, although it was more like one of those giant ferris wheels that all the cities have nowadays/

I'm not criticizing this one because it's where ferris wheels should be. In an amusement park. It's not in some tourist zone where amusements are otherwise not found. This is the rare giant ferris wheel that is properly sited. I'm still not going to ride it. I don't do things that just go round in circles.

And this is an interesting ride. Or should I say: rides.

Lined up right to each other are personal transportation vehicles. Two small cars for children to ride in. Two electric four-wheel scooters for the senior circuit. I have not seen any grotesquely overweight people here in Tbilisi (yet), so those are not the target demographic for these particular mobility scooters.

The personal transportation vehicle rental kiosk is near the upper funicular station and the upper ropeway station. And that means that my visit to Mtatsminda Park was coming to its conclusion and it was time to descend.

This was a particularly impressive funicular. Steep and longer than many.

And a clear roof so you don't miss any sights overhead.

Back to the lower part of town and for the walk back to my hotel to rest my bones.

The walk back was a bit easier, being downhill all the way.

Fun Fun Fun Funicular Away

Funicular station with (two of the three) Flame Towers looming behind
("Looming" is a foreshadowing because the day also included a visit to the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum.)

What you doing on your bed on your back?

You should be tourist-ing.

I was feeling all jetlaggy, laying in bed (on my back) and then it hit me:  I should be tourist-ing. More importantly, I should be out doing the things that brought me to Baku. Not the Maiden Tower, although it's impressive especially given its age: built halfway up in the fifth century A.D. or so and completed to its full height in the 12th Century A.D., which is very very tall for its era.

Not this attractive building:

Much newer than the Maiden Tower by uncountable centuries.  This is the Art Gallery Hotel, I believe.

And not this building:

But we're getting closer.

The Swan Fountain is even closer:

Mini-Venice is even closer.

But we're not going to take a gondola to get where we're going.

The Carpet Museum is a destination, but not the first stop of the day:

This is where we are headed first:

Well, not the Behram-ı Gür Monument. But what's behind it:

The funicular!

Ain't no fun like FUNicular fun.

Baku has only one funicular. The entire nation of Azerbaijan has one funicular. And this is it.

The funicular to Highland Park and the Flame Towers.

The ride to the top was quick. Not especially long and high. Not really steep. Is it the best funicular I've ever ridden? Not the right question. It's the funicular available to ride today and that, my friends, is more than good enough.

Pop out of the station, look to the right, and there's a Flame Tower and a mosque.

That is the Alley of Martyrs Mosque. It's Friday, so the call to prayer was audible. This is being Azerbaijan, I suspected that the "martyrs" referenced in the mosque name were Azerbaijanis killed fighting the Armenians at some point in that multi-century conflict. So I googled it. Google AI said I was mostly right. The martyrs were fighting the Armenians. But they were Ottoman soldiers who died fighting the Russian Bolshevik and Armenian soldiers in the Battle of Baku in 1918.

The view from the top of the funicular route is impressive.

The most prominent building in that picture -- and you'll be able to figure it out when I tell you the building's name -- is the Crescent Hotel.

And here's a typical tourist touristing in the tourist quarter of Baku:

I asked the young lady taking my picture for me to use the "beauty filter" -- like all the cool kids do nowadays -- to reduce the size of my gut. I think it worked.

More Flame Towers juxtaposed with the funicular station:

Let's take a stroll through Highland Park and enjoy the magnificent views:

Do you prefer your view of the Crescent with or without?

With trees?

Or without trees?

It was about then I noticed window-washers on the curved side of one of the Flame Towers:

So many viewpoints:

So many buildings in the harbor.

The body of water is, of course, the Caspian Sea.

Which isn't really, technically a "sea." It's the world's largest lake. What's second, you ask? My tour guide Azay from yesterday googled this so I didn't have to. It's Lake Superior.

This is "Eye of Baku".

It's another one of those giant ferris wheels that're in all the cities everywhere. Baku is not bucking the trend, It's riding the trend like me riding up on a funicular.

So what is that building, you may ask, that from way up here, looks like a flower opening up?

It's just a shopping mall. Deniz Mall. It's funny -- curious way not ha-ha way -- the shopping mall concept is dead in the USA but thriving in the rest of the world. Baku, apparently, being no exception.

Zooming in on the Eye of Baku:

And as I wander back to the Flame Towers:

It's getting close to time to descend. The timing being dictated by the fact that this particular funicular goes on lunch break everyday between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. Actually, it's probably the funicular workers who take the lunch break, although the funicular itself is on break, too.

Time for one last selfie up top:

And back at the funicular station with the minutes to spare before the final pre-lunch descent.

Miss it and you have to walk down ten million stairs. It's probably actually fewer than that. But the knees will think it was ten million.

And back in the lowlands. And like the statue in the middle of the fountain, I'm looking at the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum. It's the day's next destination.

Third Day in Vienna? Third Man in Vienna!

At no point on this ride did I threaten to kill Joseph Cotten

My third day in Vienna sees me take in some Third Man sights.  Let's set the mood with the biggest hit record from 1950, with 11 weeks at #1, Anton Karas's Third Man Theme.

Of course, all of my walks through Vienna take me past the Opera.  This being the first sunny day in Vienna -- maybe the first sunny day of the trip -- and everything photographs better in the sun, this warranted yet another picture of this massive structure.

I took the U1 metro line to Praterstern, which I caught at Karlplatz station just south of the Opera.

And there was the giant Ferris Wheel, known in Vienna-speak as the Wiener Riesenrad, or Vienna Giant Wheel.

If you remember the scene from the movie, with Orson Welles's Harry Lime riding the Riesenrad with Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins, the two calmly discussing whether Lime should off his best pal Martins, the wheel turns very slowly.  And the cars are the size of a Viennese hotel room.

Did I mention my hotel room was small?

On a cold, but sunny, Wednesday morning in December, there was a small line to buy tickets for the Big Wheel.  I bought my ticket and got on board for a ride.

The Riesenrad turned slow, so I wasn't worried about motion sickness.

And, being in an enclosed box, feared of heights did not kick in.  Maybe if the box hadn't been so stable, that would've been a problem.

I sound like a wuss.  Motion sickness!  Fear of heights!  Fear of enclosed spaces!  Like Charlie Brown in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," it's like I've got pantophobia: the fear of everything,

Actually, the views from the top of the circle were quite nice.  You could even see the spires of St. Stephen's.

 Yes, I really am in the car.

 And this is the point where you look down and think of the dialog from the scene in "The Third Man" where Harry Lime compares the people below to dots and asks Holly Martins that if he offered 20,000 pounds for each of the dots, would he keep his money or "calculate how many dots you could afford to spare ... free of income tax."

And that part isn't even the best part of the whole scene at the Riesenrad, which would be the famous Orson Welles "cuckoo clock" speech, maybe the greatest monologue in the movies, which you can click here to hear.

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, murder, terror, bloodshead.  And, for this morning, I have the rest of the Prater to explore.

You don't pay to be admitted to the park.  You buy a ticket for each ride.  This being winter, a lot of the rides appeared to be closed.

A lot of the attractions seemed to be "haunted house" themed, too.  There is no human selling tickets to this haunted house.  Only some sort of animatronic evil spirit.

This rollercoaster seemed to be down for the season.

This ride, the Sombrero, seems to be all sorts of politically incorrect.

There was a Las Vegas themed bar on the premises.  I think this was added after "The Third Man" was filmed here in 1949.

The bumper cars were up and running:

But I came to Prater to ride the wheel.  The wheel had been ridden, so it was time for my next "Third Man" destination.

The U3 line to Simmering, then it's catch the #71 tram to my next stop:

Zentralfriedhof.

Vienna Central Cemetery.

Two important points in "The Third Man" take place here:  the opening and the closing.  The opening scene is the burial of Harry Lime in Zentralfriedhof.  I'm not sure exactly where in the cemetery it was that Lime was buried, but there's no point in checking that out because (a) the movie is fictional and (b) the burial in the fictional movie was fictional as Harry Lime was not actually dead at the movie's opening.

So instead let's find Beethoven's grave.  And here he is:

Right next to him was Schubert.

And in the same section, sadly underappreciated with an underwhelming number of flowers, is Brahms.

Go to sleep, Johannes Brahms, go to sleep.

This is the composer section of Zentalfriedhof.  The above is a memorial statue to Mozart.  But Mozart is buried back in Vienna.

Across the way was this interesting looking tomb:

This actually is the most interesting cemetery I've ever seen.  The headstones are not universally traditional by any means.

Moving on, meet Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose equations on the property of atoms were scorned in his day.  He committed suicide in disgrace, the scientific consensus thought he was a fool, but after his death, he was exonerated,  His theorems were proven true.

His tomb bears the equation of S = k log W.  The formula for entropy.  Living my life as a gradual descent into chaos and disorder, I thought a graveside "selfie" was in order.

Next up was the artist's section.

That is the grave of the artist Franz West.  Below is a gravestone that took the form of a white cloth draped over a piano:

Multiple interesting headstones in this "honors" section of the cemetery.

This was my favorite.  I think it's the most beautiful "gravestone" I've ever seen.

I looked at the plaque to see who it could be:

Actress and inventor, the beautiful Hedy Lamarr.  I didn't even know she was buried here or that she was Viennese.

Selfie with Hedy?

Interesting tombstones all around in this neck of the cemetery woods.

The final one, the fat cat above, is Austrian artist Manfred Deix.  Don't feel inferior if you have not heard him, his wikipedia page is only in German.

There are two things in this cemetery you will see in "The Third Man."  First, are the green domes visible throughout the cemetery.

You will see them lurking in the background in a number of shots.  Second, there are the cemetery walkways.

I don't know which one is THE one where the famous final scene was shot, the landscaping being different, but that final camera shot, linked here, is one of the great movie-ending scenes, where at the scene of Harry Lime's real funeral, Joseph Cotton's Holly Martins waits for the beautiful Anna as she approaches from a distance and ... then ... walks right past him without a glance.

I'm walking in this section of the cemetery looking for the grave of ...

The Pride of Austria!  Vienna's own Falco!  Still well remembered even more than 30 years after his major U.S. hits.  Which was your favorite?  Pick one as your musical accompaniment here:  (1) the dark, brooding Der Kommissar, where Falco makes German a great language for rap;  (2) the international dance smash Rock Me Amadeus, which made Falco an international superstar;  or the jaunty fun of Vienna Calling.

This interesting tombstone was right next door.

But there are only so many interesting tombstones one can view in a day.  Back on the tram!

Back to Karlplatz.

And here I find the Third Man Museum.

I thought it was opened on Wednesdays, but it is only open Saturday afternoons.  So I went to a nearby coffee shop, for a coffee, a (gluten free) Esterhazy schnitte (very very hazelnut), and a vanilla macaron.

A civilized way to rest my barking dogs.  And what was the music playing in the coffee shop?  It wasn't Falco.  It wasn't Christmas music.  But it was awesome.  It was THIS.