The rest of Linz would probably make for a good visit on a dreary winter day.
If your tastes run more towards art than human physiology, there is the Lentos Kunstmuseum. Works by Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, and others are housed in an oddly-shaped building that achieves unprecedented degrees of camouflage when viewed against a blue sky. Though you wouldn't have the blue sky on a dreary winter day.
If your tastes run more towards art than human physiology, there is the Lentos Kunstmuseum. Works by Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, and others are housed in an oddly-shaped building that achieves unprecedented degrees of camouflage when viewed against a blue sky. Though you wouldn't have the blue sky on a dreary winter day.
There's the Schlossmuseum, located in an old castle that overlooks the city. Behind the castle is a winding bit of fairy garden that leads past a monument to Johannes Kepler, framed with bright yellow forsythia. Of course, you wouldn't have bright yellow forsythia on a dreary winter day. Or the fairy garden.
Perhaps instead you could visit some churches. There's the Mariendom, which has some of the most brilliantly coloured stained glass windows I've ever seen. The windows along either side of the sanctuary feature scenes from the Bible, while the ones behind the altar look like something your favourite statistical software might spit out.
The colours might not be as bright on a dreary winter day, and I'd definitely recommend keeping your coat on. If you need to warm up, you might run over to the Alte Dom. Not that it's warmer. But the run might do you good, and you get to see the organ that Anton Bruckner used to play when he was church organist.
Now, I'm not certain about all of this, because when I visited last Saturday, it was far from a dreary winter day. On the contrary, not only did I have to turn down the colour saturation on my camera - because the sun was that bright and the daffodils were that yellow - I also had to take my coat off.
The only thing I wouldn't recommend doing on a dreary winter day is mindlessly getting on the one train back to Vienna that's not run by ÖBB, and not even realising it because you're too involved with your Linzer cookie and, let's be honest, a bit of a brainless twit anyway. Because when that happens, the ticket lady will tell you to either get out at the next station and wait for another ÖBB train or pay an extra € 17 for a new ticket on top of the € 34.80 you've already spent. Sitting on a dark train platform in the middle of Upper Austria promising yourself that this will be the last time you get on a WESTbahn train (knowing that this is not the first time you've made this promise and probably won't be the last) isn't a heap of fun on a mild spring evening. On a dreary winter night it would be miserable.