Vienna, day 3

Before I start, 2 disclaimers:
1-I'm sorry if I have some dumb misspellings - the spell checker isn't working
2 - I'm sorry I only have 1 picture up, but Blogger is being uncooperative in that respect as well

Today we set out to visit Schoenbrun, the summer palace of the Hapsburgs. I was really excited to see this palace, a) because Maria Theresa is my hero and b) because I haven't been inside. When UD Chorale visited in 2001 we sa, but I want to say we just walked around the grounds. In any case, I was really looking forward to it.

We started off doing a tour of about 40 rooms in the palace - not even close to half of it. most of it was decorated in the 1700s, so you can imagine the Baroque extravagance. Glossy white walls, or expensive Rosewood walls, with gilted gold trim. We did the audio tour, so we got a fairly detailed description of what each room was used for, when it was decorated, and that sort of thing. I think some of pieces I enjoyed the most were the portraits of all of the royal children - little kids sitting for portraits in those powdered wigs? I wonder how the royalty got their kids to sit still.

Something that struck me was that each room connected to the other. It wasn't like there were really hallways or anything. In order to get to one room from somewhere else in the palace, you had to go through someone's bedroom or study - I guess if you're a king you've got enough people around that you can partially ensure your own privoucy. Something else I thought was interesting was that Franz Joseph, who was emperor of Austria until 1916, worked about 16 hours a day from the time he was 18 until the time he died at 86.

Ok, that's probably enough about that. After about an hour and a half or so inside the castle, we moved on to the Tiergarten, or the zoo. Since it was snowing we tried to stay inside when possible, the first building we found being the rainforest haus. In there, we discovered that the folks around here are serious about hands on exhibits - on the first floor of the hothaus there's a little room that's billed as a bat exhibit. What they don't state on the sign is that the bats are actually flying around in the room with you. When we started to pull the partitions aside, I could've sworn something was flying at my so I didn't want to chance it. There were some other folks, however, who were trying to go in, and a few seconds after we turned to walk away we heard a lot of screaming. You couldn't have paid me to do that!

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around and saw some really cute stuff. We got pictures of Eisbaeren for Kristin (no, not Knut - he's in Berlin), Elefanten for Karen, and got a really cute picture of some cheetas cuddled up together for ourselves. We went into the Vogelhaus, and Trey was whistling back and forth with a parrot -that was cute!

I think one of the highlights, though, was going to see the Orangutans - the zoo here has a fairly new habitat for them, though they were all in the indoor portion because (again) it was snowing. In any case, one of the cutest things was when I walked up to one portion of the glass and Sol, their youngest orangutan by a couple of decades came up to the window to pose with us. Here's a picture of her with Trey, although in her picture with me she was even closer:

After a bit more time we decided to come back to the hotel, and we decided on dinner in, too. We stepped out briefly to get some kabob (no, not shishkabob - this is totally different) and spent the evening munching while watching The Simpsons, Family Guy, and now South Park in German - though most of it is dubbed, Timmy's voice is not. :-)

Tomorrow's a musical day for us. Keep your fingers crossed that the reports of sleet aren't going to materialize because we're hoping to visit the cemetary, too.