Vienna

Vienna. What a rockin’ town. (I’m playing air guitar with Strauss).

In fact, I’d say that Vienna is easily one of the most livable cities I’ve ever visited. It had charm. It had history. It had Mozart drunkenly leering at ladies and peeing his name in the snowy streets. My kind of town.

Seriously, the town was great and very much worth the visit. It is the essence of the word charm. For the first couple minutes, I felt like I had to go to finishing school just to walk around. Then I saw the rollerbladers.

To add to the charm, it had an oddly disproportionate amount of palaces and pomp for a country slightly smaller than Maine. But that was due to those Ka-razy Habsburgs who ruled half of Europe for the better part of 500 years.

During that time, they set up some of the most beautiful royal grounds in Europe, complete with gardens, statues, fountains, strolling grounds, and, of course, hedge mazes. These are now all open to the public to get lost in.

Here I'm at the Brunn part of the Schönbrunn Palace posing like Arnold, an Austrian often mistaken for being a German.


And here you can see my bowel reaction after drinking the water from Slovakia on the previous day. Unlike Bratislava, the water in Austria is very good and safe to drink - the best in all of Europe they say.

The town also had a popular and touristy shopping area that had all the glammer and glitz of Chicago's fancy-pants Magnificient Mile. Das über cool!

The funny thing about Austrians is that they speak German, look German and are often mistaken as Germans (Adolf, Freud, Mozart, and Porsche – they’re all Austrians). But, unlike the Germans, these volk prefer schnitzel to sausage and wine to beer. They also don’t have as many rules as the Germans. Which is good. The one odd rule they do keep, though, is that grass is sacred and anyone who sets foot on public grass is immediately shot through the chest with a laser beam. Scary.

So, as you can see, instead of stepping on the grass, Kate tried eating the beautiful foliage. Unfortunately, it affected her allergies.







But we did a little too much walking than was healthy, as Kate's frizzy hair and swollen hands could attest to. The exhaustion was nothing that a coffee (melange) and a apple küchen couldn't cure. The only sad part was that we didn't have more time....to take more pictures of Kate's hair.