Crime Museum in Vienna, Austria

Those with a squeamish disposition are adised to skip the Crime Museum in Vienna, Austria (known as KriminalMuseum in German). Tucked away in what seems like a relatively small old building, this place is a veritable TARDIS of gore.
All the text is in German, and the stories of Vienna’s ancient crimes are going to get lost in translation for the non-linguists, but much of the utterly sinister collection is visual. And visceral, for that matter.
The Crime Museum is clearly aimed at the sort of demographic that enjoys walking through extensive cellars, looking at picture after picture of murder victims.
Yes, there are some bits on the sterling work of the police force, but the emphasis is certainly skewed towards rusty torture instruments, brutal weapons and photos of de-limbed torsos being dug up.
But sometimes it’s a refreshing change to settle in for a couple of hours of witch-burnings, violent confession extractions, lynch mobs and mummified heads in jars.
The whole thing is an engaging, morally ambiguous romp through Vienna’s criminal past. Much is ordered chronologically, with illustrated year-by-year and blow-by-blow accounts about the most newsworthy murders complimented by extensive profiles of the crooks. Lovely stuff.

Getting to the Crime Museum in Vienna, Austria

Nearest international airport: Vienna

Using public transport: Get bus number 5A or tram N. The museum is at Große Sperlgasse 24.

More information: Kriminalmuseum

Museum of Contraception and Abortion in Vienna, Austria

A short walk from Vienna’s Westbahnhof is a heavy wooden door, almost specifically designed to make people go away. To get through it, you need to press a buzzer, and once finally upstairs you’re ushered into what looks disturbingly like the waiting room of a family planning clinic.
This is the Museum of Contraception and Abortion (though the tourist board literature prefers to leave that last bit out), and it is a bizarre combination of the serious and the frivolous.
Cases are filled with pills and applicators from through the years, while on the walls pie charts and statistics about illegal abortions are opposite cartoons of Victorian types blowing up condoms in some kind of hilarious parlour game.
It covers the whole gamut – diaphragms to sterilisation, via anti-baby lipstick and bidets designed specifically for a post-coital wash. And then there are some implements where it’s probably best to have a limited understanding of German.

Getting to Vienna

Nearest International Airport: Vienna’s airport is well connected to the rest of the world, although budget airline fans can fly into Bratislava just across the border with Slovakia, and take the short train ride in.
Using public transport: The Museum of Abortion and Contraception is just over the busy main road from Vienna Westbahnhof, which is the city’s major train station. It doesn’t really look like a museum, but the address is 37/1 Mariahilfer Gürtel.

More information: Museum website

Globe Museum in Vienna, Austria

It’s hard to get anything more wholesome than globes, and there are absolutely hundreds of them in the Austrian National Library. Once a private collection, it has now ballooned across an entire floor, and walking in is quite surreal. It’s almost as if someone has gone to the drawing room of every fictional Victorian detective commandeering their globes, then bundled them all willy-nilly into massive glass cabinets. There are 420 of them in total, and just when you think it’s all over, there’s another room with an even higher concentration.
As all good bizarre museums should be, it is ludicrously over-detailed and answers questions you’d never even thought of asking. Has anyone ever seriously thought about how globes are made? Well here you can find out as interactive screens painstakingly go through the process, step by step.
The whole place gives a peek of a whole new world that most of us never knew existed. Making globes is part art, part craft, part science, and old, highly-styled ones are worth a fortune. They date back to 360BC, and a few makers are revered as artists (despite getting countries in the wrong place and covering up parts they didn’t know all that much about with pictures of lions).
One from 1541 is fabulously inaccurate, and we know because an actual map has been superimposed on top of it. Half of Africa is in the Indian Ocean, Jerusalem is in Sudan, New Delhi is where Arabia should be and Tokyo has been transported to Mongolia. Australia, of course, hadn’t been discovered by that time, and is conveniently replaced by a few sea monsters.

Getting to the Globe Museum in Vienna

Nearest international airport: Vienna International Airport.
Using public transport: The Globe Museum at the Austrian National Library can be found in the Palais Mollard, near the Herrengasse U-Bahn station.

World’s biggest ice cave – Eisriesenwelt near Salzburg, Austria

Whilst caverns made of rock are all well and good, sometimes you want something a little more spectacular. That’s what ice is for, and this complex near Salzburg, Austria is home to the world’s largest ice cave.
Over the years, the flow of air has ensured that walls, stalagmites and stalactites have formed, and some of the frozen formations are up to 20 metres thick.
The result is something that looks like a science-fiction film set, and a walk through the surreal crystalline world is fascinating, if a little on the cold side.
The Eisriesenwelt is open from the end of April to the end of October, and you’ve got a choice of getting there on foot or by cable car.

Ars Electronica Centre in Linz, Austria

Museum of the future?
The Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria is something quite unlike anywhere else on earth. Billing itself as the Museum of the Future, a taste of what’s to come is available at the entrance.
To the left of the ticket desk, a little girl is flying.
She’s strapped into a contraption called Humphrey II, suspended from the ceiling with wires and harness, and fixing her gaze on the screen in front.
According to the display, she’s flying through the streets of a digitally-rendered Linz, and the whole shebang is operating like a Jetsons-era hang-glider.
Movements of the hands steer left and right, as well as allow her to plunge up and down. And, when she does the latter, she goes straight into the Danube.
Little did we know that the mighty river contains an Atlantis-like civilization, huh?

Year 3000 guitar fretboard
The building is absolutely crammed with such gadgets, games and simulations. One acts as a giant Year 3000 guitar fretboard. A beam of light passes along a bench (you can control the speed at which it does so), and you can place bits of felt and plastic along it. Depending on where you place them, it makes a different sound as the beam hits. It’s difficult to make anything more than a tuneless racket though.

Bizarre table
Then there’s the bizarre table with what appears to be a kids cartoon village on it. However, the images change depending on what you put on top of it. Stick down a coffee cup, and a few buildings emerge. Put a bit of rope in a circle, and it suddenly grows into a pond, full of ducks. Break the loop and the ducks fly away in formation.
In truth, many of these whizz-bang outpourings of inventiveness are utterly bewildering. They’re all undoubtedly very clever, but often it’s impossible to work out what something’s meant to do or how to make it do it. Sometimes it’s obvious that the fish move when you hit the drums, but in others it’s just an intimidating mess of screens and largely pointless interactivity.

Virtual Cave
One of the star attractions is a ‘Virtual Cave’ and it’s a crushing disappointment – 12 people huddle into a small alcove wearing silly glasses and are guided around virtual worlds by a staff member with a controller. It’d be fantastic if you could explore yourself in your own private booth, but travelling through a cyber-Renaissance city behind a crowd isn’t all that gripping.

Visitor photos
Amongst the weird flappy arm-y things and digital marionettes, it’s actually the simpler things that enchant the most. Pictures emerging when you pour sand through a funnel, merging your photo with that of previous visitors... that sort of hi-jinks is pure gold every time.

Getting to the Ars Electronica Centre

Nearest International Airport: A few budget airline flights go direct to Linz’s small airport, but many will fly into Vienna. Linz is approximately 90 minutes by train from Vienna’s Westbahnhof.

Using public transport: The trickiest thing about the Ars Electronica Center is finding it. The tourist board maps say it’s just over the Danube from the main town square. Go there, however, and you find a giant building site with nary a magical flower or computer-animated dragon in sight. The workmen don’t look too interested in that sort of thing either.
It turns out that the Center WILL be there, but not until next year. The new home will be a mammoth, ultra-sleek, beautifully designed centrepiece for the Capital of Culture 2009 festivities. Until then, it’s at Graben 15. Get tram number 3 from the train station.

More information: Ars Electronica Centre

International Esperanto Museum in Vienna, Austria

The National Library in Vienna is home to one for the purists: a museum devoted to a language that hardly anyone speaks and no nation recognises as an official mother tongue.
And what could possibly be better than learning Esperanto by playing Pacman? The computer game is the unquestioned highlight of the International Esperanto Museum. A word comes up on the screen, and visitors have to pick the right suffix by eating the correct ghost.
This isn’t quite as implausibly difficult as it sounds. It was designed as an auxiliary language – something the whole world could speak as a second language in order to communicate with each other better – and is structured to be as simple as possible. It also steals heavily from the Latin languages, so anyone with vague Spanish or French is in with a chance. Rapida means fast, urbo means town, sana means healthy – all fairly logical, and the ghosts take a pounding.
The rest of the exhibition charts the history of the language, created in 1887 by well-meaning Pole L. L. Zamenhof, and much of it is brilliantly pointless. There are photos of people meeting at Esperanto congresses (with a predictably high concentration of beards), translations of famous books and headphones where you can listen to people reading in the doomed language. It’s almost enough to make you want to learn out of solidarity.
But it also manages to make the point that the idea of an invented language isn’t quite as silly as many may think. After all, we speak one ourselves. The exhibition runs through everyday English words that have been made up on the spot by someone (usually Shakespeare). Bedroom, amazement, serendipity, fashionable, worthless... even God.
It’s bizarrely gripping, and makes skipping all those spectacular Hapsburg palaces and art galleries seem inherently worthwhile.

Getting to the International Esperanto Museum in Vienna

Nearest international airport: Vienna’s airport is served by a wide range of airlines, and is well connected to the rest of the globe.
Using public transport: The International Esperanto Museum at the Austrian National Library can be found in the Palais Mollard, near the Herrengasse U-Bahn station.