GETTING A WORKOUT IN VIENNA
If you need to lose a few pounds really quickly, here’s a three-day regimen I recommend. No dieting required.
Head to Vienna. Visit three imperial palaces of the Habsburg dynasty. Just crossing their massive gardens will give anyone a workout.
The Habsburgs who ruled Austria for 600 years until 1918 also controlled an empire that spanned 11 countries and 10 languages, so their palace complexes were not modest.
At the gate of the Upper Belvedere, an 18th century palace built as part of the summer residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy, my sisters and I surveyed the fountains and extensive garden before us and reflected on how long it would take us to walk from the gate to the palace building in the distance.
“Whoever we visit at the palace would still have time to take a bath before we got to the building,” my sister Melanie joked.
And that was just for the garden in front of the palace. The garden behind the palace linking Upper Belvedere to Lower Belvedere, another palace in the complex, cost us an equal amount of electrolytes.
Upper Belvedere holds the Habsburgs’ imperial art collection and centuries of Austrian art, including Gustav Klimt’s art nouveau painting
The Kiss. Lower Belvedere hosts temporary art exhibits.
At the Habsburgs’ other summer residence, the 17th century Schoenbrunn Palace, the grounds cover 160 hectares because it started out as the court’s recreational hunting ground.
“The Habsburgs stayed here from June to September only,” our guide Brigitta said. “Whenever they came, they came with 1,500 servants because their relatives and officials came with them.”
We explored some of the palace’s 1,441 rooms.
Schoenbrunn’s interesting occupants included Maria Theresa, the Habsburg dynasty’s only female ruler. She had 16 children, including Marie Antoinette, who lost her head in France. For deftly marrying off her children to European VIPs to benefit the empire, Maria Theresa is referred to as the “mother-in-law of Europe.”
Other famous occupants were Napoleon Bonaparte, who made the palace his headquarters after invading Vienna in the 1800s; and Elisabeth or “Sisi,” wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, known during the 19th century as “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“She was 5’7” but 98 pounds. She weighed herself twice or thrice daily. And if she was gaining weight, she would drink just a glass of milk from a special cow and have a roll that day,” Brigitta said.
Today, such discipline in the name of beauty would be called an eating disorder.
In the garden behind this palace, a structure called the Gloriette “built to glorify the Habsburg family” stands on a hill a good 300 meters away.
“Maria Theresa had breakfast there,” Brigitta said. “Do you think she walked there? No, she was carried there.”
Schoenbrunn’s park and gardens are so vast that they contain 20 attractions, including a zoo.
In central Vienna, the main winter residence of the Habsburgs occupies a more modest 24 hectares. But Hofburg Palace has nearly double the number of Schoenbrunn’s rooms, at 2,600.
Now the official home and office of Austria’s president, the 13th-century palace features a Spanish Riding School (for classical horsemanship), the Sisi Museum (dedicated to the legendary beauty), the Imperial Apartments, the Imperial Silver Collection, and the Imperial Treasury holding the former empire’s crown jewels.
Next to the palace is Heroes’ Square (Heldenplatz), where Adolf Hitler announced to the masses Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany in 1938. The big square holds the statues of two great military commanders, which we did not approach, as we figured we had already had enough exercise for the year.
After all, we had walked to Hofburg Palace from the gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral, and through Vienna’s popular pedestrian streets Graben and Kohlmarkt as well.
Graben is an elegant shopping street featuring a Plague Column, a Baroque memorial built after the Great Plague of 1679. Kohlmarkt, on the other hand, is Vienna’s most expensive shopping street. The price tags on the designer goods here may help you lose your appetite.
As for St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Austria’s most important church, where the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was married and had two children baptized, we had also ambled by its catacombs and centuries-old artifacts.
There is no reason not to lose weight in Vienna.
Even if you scarfed down Vienna’s wiener schnitzel (breaded veal cutlet), sachertorte (chocolate apricot cake) and coffee with cognac daily, you could still burn all the evidence by taking on the city’s over 1,000 kilometers of bike paths.
“You can rent a bike anywhere,” said our guide. “Just register. The first hour is free. So people here rent a bike for 59 minutes, return the bike in another station in the city, then register for another one. Anyway, the intention is just to get people off their cars.”
If we did this in Cebu, we would hit four birds with one stone: end traffic, cut pollution, save gas money, and finally get that killer body we could flaunt at weddings and reunions.