A Series of Unfortunate Events

Graz, the city where I learned to take things as they come.

But hey, at least I found smoothies.

Graz is the city where a ballet we went to turned out to be a children’s dance recital, a contemporary art museum had no exhibits on display, a lackluster armory, and a heat rash broke out on my butt (yikes man). Insert quote about the journey being the adventure or something.

‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ was certainly the title for our day and a half spent in Graz. Arriving in the city Monday at about 11:00, we were unable to check into our hostel until 15:00, but for some reason decided as a group not to check in until 18:00??? This turned into a weirdly chopped up evening in which we were forced to stay out with aching feet and a need to change our clothes for much longer than we anticipated.

As a group we went to a place called Murinsel, a little island cafe in the middle of the Mur River in Graz. It’s actually really cool, and we ordered drinks and hung out on the river with a beautiful view for an hour or so. Also the bathrooms here are completely made of mirrors and round and curvy? This makes for a very trippy bathroom trip, especially when you decided to get a wine spritzer at noon.

After this cute little place came the highlight of Graz: Schlossberg. It’s this sort of mini mountain that’s in the middle of the city, and offers the most amazing city views, beautiful gardens, and walking trails. I would legitimately go back to Graz just for the Schlossberg views.

See what I MEAN???

After this adventure, myself, Corrie, and Kenzie took off on our own to try to explore some more. We did find this place on the Schlossberg that was a super huge slide on the inside of the mountain! It was crazy fun, and I did take a video of myself going down it, but again wordpress won’t let me upload videos. /: As a placeholder, here are some pictures of pretty places we discovered along the way…

Graz is beautiful enough that you really could just walk around for hours admiring architecture and going into stores, but at this point our feet were aching and we just had to get settled, so we went ahead and made the 25 minute trek back to the hostel, and waited in the lobby a full hour before we were able to check in.

After getting ourselves a little bit more put together came the BEST part of Graz: ITS BRITTNEY BITCH! If you remember, she’s been staying in a hotel in Graz, so this evening we were able to go get dinner with her and her parents, and then we returned to the Murinsel to see it lit up at night. I don’t have many pictures from this evening because we were all just enjoying ourselves, but enjoy this sweaty and blurry and overall not amazing picture of her and I at the Murinsel.

Next morning, bright an early, we set out to the Kunsthaus Museum in Graz. Brittney was able to join our group for these morning adventures which was amazing, but this is where the unfortunate events start trickling in. Upon arrival to the Kunsthaus, we found that it actually didn’t have any exhibits at the time. Like, nothing. Why did our travel agency book us this museum? Great question, I don’t have an answer. But the nice lady at the front desk told us that our tickets were vouchers that would actually get us into a couple other museums, which we didn’t know, so we left in search of this area of town.

I honestly really loved the museum(s) we found, though by this point we only had a couple of hours to go through them, and I’m sad I didn’t get to spend more time enjoying the exhibits. I am someone who could easily spend hours on end just in one museum, so maybe that’s just me. One half of the museum was a natural history museum, and the other half was a mixture of contemporary art and historic art. It was for sure a surprise highlight of the day. I won’t bore you with tons of pictures from the museums because I feel like they never completely grasp the beauty of the work you are seeing (and if my blog gets boring I will be very disappointed in myself), so here are a few highlights instead.

Because of the Great Museum Mix-Up and the fact that we were on a Very Tight Schedule, we only had about a 25 minute break to get some food before we had to go to the armory. I don’t have much to say about the armory except that it was rather dusty and is the place where I realized I had broken out into a heat rash. I thought the horse armor was cool, so enjoy the only picture I took in this place.

Our travel agency recommended us to have a solid 2 or 3 hours to go through this place, but since it was basically just four floors of metal, most of us got through in under a half hour. After a much-needed headache-curing cold-beverage-providing coffee stop, a large group of us decided to adventure off and see if we could find the Stairs of Separation and Reconciliation. It took us a hot minute (a literal hot minute) to find them because they’re sort of tucked away in a corner building, but they were actually really cool and worth it.

After a couple hours during which we explored the staircase and chilled in a nearby park, we had a tour of the Graz Opera House. It’s an insanely beautiful building, and as we’re all theatre majors, it was cool to see the professional workings of a theatre and realize that a lot of the things they do or ways they are set up is pretty similar to our college theatre. We also got to take pictures on the stage, so that’s pretty awesome.

A very quick break later led us to probably the funniest misadventure of our time here: we went to a ballet gala at the Graz Opera House. That makes you think of professional dancers and ladies in long dresses, right? Now, remember when you were three years old and took a dance class, and you and your class had to hold hands to walk on stage together, and there was that one kid in the corner spinning in a circle and another one waving to her mom? A closer description to what we saw. It was funny, actually, and the teenage ballet dancers were actually quite talented, but the majority of us left at intermission in search of food.

Overall our trip to Graz was not in any way terrible and we had a number of hidden treasure finds, but there was definitely a number of little things, along with the combination of heat and long jeans that I wore (hence the heat rash) that were discouraging and made us all feel a little blah.

Believe it or not, if there’s one thing I could change about our time in Graz, it’s actually that we would spend a little more time there. Graz is a college city and very hipster and up-and-coming, and most of the tourist offerings include lots of cute food places and amazing shopping opportunities, which we only very briefly got to take advantage of. I think that what little time we spent there was either super jam-packed of little things or free time at a time when we all just wanted a chance to lay down for a second, or go grab a croissant, or something (am I even making sense?). I really would have liked to get to know the city better, because I feel like I left there still a stranger.

But anyways, onward and upward! Next stop: Salzburg.

Love Always, Val