On the first week of June my wife and I took a train to Vienna as part of my birthday trip. Instead of Schönbrunn and Wienerschnitzl I selected two museums as our programme for the day: the Royal Armouries and the Military History Museum. Both are within 20mins of the main train station, although in opposite directions.
We started with the Royal Armouries (Hofjagd- und Rüstkammer), which houses many fancy artefacts of the Renaissance, starting from the 1490s all the way to the middle of the 17th century. There are many halls full of arms and armour, a fine choice if you are into stuff like that.
I took a multitude of photos, but here are the highlights of the day, starting with a big bunch of two-handed swords.
One of Maximilian I's many jousting armors.
A fancy katzbalger with a gold hilt, and some cinquedeas.
A half-armor made to look like landsknecht clothing. Apparently it had interchangeable pieces.
The museum is located in the Hofburg and you can visit two more exhibitions with the same ticket, but we did not bother with those. There is also a quite nice souvenir shop, where I bought an English language booklet. (Honestly my standards were high, because nothing really beats the Vasa Museum's shop, if you are ever there take a look for yourself.)
From here we went to a downtown store selling modelling supplies (mainly for architectural models) where I purchased a new cutting mat, steel and styrene rod, and 2.5mm copper tube (which I'll use for the Aurora's masts).
Our next stop was the military history museum, where unfortunately most of the exhibitions were closed (including the naval one, for which we will probably return), but we were able to see the Napoleonic themed one, the one about the 1848 revolutions and Risorgimento, and the World War I one.
Besides the kind of popularist entry room where artefact from the Sarajevo assassination were shown (including the dresses of the deceased archduke and his wife), the rest of the exhibition was very well done, and the center piece was a 305mm mortar with a fully assembled carriage and loading mechanism. One can't really appreciate the size of the thing without standing next to it, but just for the sake of it here's a photo looking right into the barrel:
From there we took a tram back to the train station, had our lunch and visited some shops before boarding the train back home.
A fine day all in all, and my thanks goes to my significant other for participating and bearing with me throughout!
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