Experiencing mass in Vienna’s St. Augustine Church

Everything in Vienna is just beautiful and good. Beautiful place. Beautiful people (inside and out – will tell stories about it later). Good food. Really good smell. Beautiful music – even the clanging of the bells of neighboring churches (St Stephen’s Cathedral, St. Augustine Church, St. Michael Church) is like music, they were all in symphony. And every Sunday mass can be like a concert; which it really is in St. Augustine Church’s 11am Sunday mass.

We wanted to experience mass with the Vienna Boys’ Choir singing the hymns. But we need two months advance booking for it and the ticket is at ~€30 which i find weird, paying a fee to attend mass. We already had our reservation at Vienna State Opera House hence we were having second thoughts on buying another ticket for the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Thankfully though, good ol’ Rick Steves mentioned in his book that the St. Augustine Church holds concert masses, for free! Since we’ve limited time, we can only attend one mass. And albeit I wanted to hear how good the Vienna Boys’ Choir really is, we opted for the free concert mass in St. Augustine instead teehee. And indeed we weren’t disappointed. It was good time again for Atsushi to catch up with his jetlag though haha.

Located on Josefsplatz, next to the Hofburg Palace, the church is a simpler gothic version compared to Stephansdom. It’s still majestic though what with chandeliers hanging from it’s Gothic ceiling.

Will add pictures in this post later. For now, here are snippets of the concert mass. Pardon for the bad angles though. It’s not really forbidden to record the whole mass but then this is still a Holy Mass with all the proper rituals hence it was a bit embarrassing to record overtly. I had to do it covertly, hence the bad angles :p.

music corner

It truly was a productive long weekend, mostly with home prepping. Dining table delivered at last by Watanabe Furniture Shop, the friendly neighborhood shop although i’m yet to decorate it. As expected, dining table came in pieces. Watanabe-san and his apprentice set it all up and gave us, as part of their service, the Indonesian malong that they used in their display. Yay!

The two DIY bookshelves (each as tall as Atsushi and twice his width) were also delivered and it’s already 95% filled as of last night. Yet, we’re barely 1/4 done in arranging the books. Some books may have to be sold/donated/thrown away. We ordered for 2 more bookshelves and thankfully, they’re not DIY so it’ll be easier. Yes, it’ll be a home cum library and I am not complaining. A lot of Atsushi’s books are really interesting with a WIDE selection of topics, making me want to learn Japanese and fast. Mine are more on fantasy and novels. 😀

Anyways, we also DIY-ed the shelf for the mini-music corner. Bought it at Tokyu Hands and since we want to get immediately started on organizing the mini-corner, we opted to carry it home instead of having it delivered. See how truly thoughtful the Japanese customer service is. They put a foam on the bag handle to protect our hands. How thoughful!

Japan is probably the DIY-country, where you can DIY a lot of stuff. Found the perfect corner stand I had in mind albeit we have to DIY it. But it was pretty easy to assemble so it was just perfect.

Behold, the stand adjuster – just in case you have uneven flooring.

BEFORE: Music corner with a boxful of music scores.

AFTER: Tada! 🙂

The music scores kept piling up after this shot as we “unearthed” more scores in the other boxes. We’re yet to look for four (yes, four!) guitar stands for Atsushi’s guitars but as Hubbie said, maybe we’ll just display two, for now. Atsushi told me to try and learn playing his base guitar – I have never been as pressured…HELP!!!

Oh, just now, we had another earthquake. Thankfully, the music corner held.