17^th October. 2013 – 40 students from II.AP and IV.BP classes along with pedagogical supervisors Mgr. Paula Panáková and PaedDr. Jane Daubnerová went on excursions to Vienna, the capital city of Austria.

Our sightseeing excursion began at one of the 10 best natural history museums in the world, Museum of Natural History( Naturhistorisches Museum ). It was built in the late 19th century for storing and presenting vast collections of the Habsburg monarchs, with more than 25 million items on display. Among them, the famous huge skeletons of dinosaurs, large collection of meteorites, endangered and extinct animals and many more.

From the museum we moved into the historic center of Vienna, which became the UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011. While walking, we admired a lot of interesting and famous sites. Gothic St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Hofburg (residence of the Habsburgs), buildings of political institutions such as Parliament, the Castle Theatre, The City Hall, State Opera (known for its Opera Ball), many churches with impressive architectural features, romantic medieval streets, which have been preserved to this day and luxury shopping streets.

Vienna is a popular host city of international conferences and negotiations at the highest diplomatic level, so we visited also the UN office in Vienna. The United Nations has four offices, which are located in New York, Geneva, Nairobi and Vienna. During our tour, we had the two English-speaking guides to learn that the Vienna office employs more than 4,000 employees from more than one hundred countries. Approximately one-third of them are Austrians. Although the office is based in the German-speaking country, the language of communication is English. In the complex of UN buildings, there are numerous services for the employees, such as clothes cleaning, post offices, banks,  newsagents, travel agents, nurseries for children, language courses, dining, several cafes, tax free shops and even many other additional services.

We learned about the history of the UN and about their work in the field of drug control and crime, about the issue of refugees, the peaceful uses of outer space and atomic energy, about the banning the testing of nuclear weapons. We were also shown the United Nations conference room.

Nice autumn weather was our pleasant companion. We want to thank our students for punctuality, exemplary behavior and representation of the school.