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28.4.12

Vienna Sewers with the Third Man - This One's a Stinker!

Very much like I bumped into the Polanski film Cul-de-sac's tv-cast, and ended up visiting the filming locations later, I happened to watch Carol Reed's great classic The Third Man and had to Google right away the whereabouts of the shooting locations. Indeed, there are at least an organised walking tour, a museum dedicated entirely to the Third Man movie, and a tour in the sewers. Sewers! I had been in Vienna couple of times earlier, but it never occurred me you can actually enter the sewage system and experience the real deal yourself. The sewer walking tours are operated by the Vienna sewage system maintenance guys themselves, so in addition to witnessing some authentic Third Man locations, you'll get to learn about the history and the present of the Viennese waste water system and witness the actual movements of bowel movements...

In the movie the water was flooding over that wall.
The sewers entrance was at the very same spot where Orson Welles' character Harry Lime escaped his pursuers. The building in the background was easily recognisable from the film, and especially the underground entrance with it's peculiar opening splitting in triangular parts and the underground spiral stairway were really familiar looking. Next to the entrance there was a giant red concrete sculpture depicting a sewer system manhole grating, a shape which serves as a mutual symbol for different Third Man attractions in Vienna the two other of which are a walking tour and a museum.

Before entering the sewers the guide handed out helmets for everyone and down we went. Quite soon it became also nasally quite obvious that we were indeed in a sewage system. The tour included four or five stops where the guide told us about the sewer system operation and some of them were easily recognised as actual filming spots from the movie. On couple of these undeground locations there were nice multivision slideshow montages projected creatively using the sewer architecture as screen. In the slowly flowing channels the waste of  Vienna was drifting with all imaginable human bodily secretions.

Back on the ground we gave back the helmets. The disinfectant liquid that was put available for the visitors was really popular.

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