Tiergarten

So the travel weekend, which I had long intended to spend in Prague sounded expensive and a little crowded, so we stayed in town and went to the world’s oldest zoo instead. This was definitely also the coolest zoo in the world, hands down. Within the first quarter of an hour, we watched a butterfly hatch and discovered a new kind of amphibian. The zoo has the beautiful architecture of Schönbrunn (they’re on the same grounds), only it has wild animals instead of overpriced cake.

The zoo had all of the regular trappings, all of the things you’d expect at a zoo.

And a few of things that you wouldn’t (looking at my pictures, I’d say it was mostly stuff you wouldn’t...)

Since this zoo is so old they had some of the old cages that they used when it was originally built as the emperor’s personal corner of the animal kingdom (a la our dear MJ). Their children’s area looked like the set in the second half of the time machine when he’s in the year 20,000something. It looked so fun and so forbidden. There was no one over 3 feet tall on it and I’m pretty sure no one bigger would fit.

There was a hike inside the zoo, which was both beautiful and a good little workout. At the top, there was a beautiful view of the whole city which you could take in from a canopy walk in the trees. Then we went down to see the panthers feed which we maybe should have skipped. I just wanted to see them up close, but I forgot what they eat. How do you tell an enormous spotted cat that he’s got a little bloody rabbit fur on his mouth?

Speaking of eating, we tried ‘Langos’ as our over-priced zoo food purchase of the day. It looked like a funnel cake and a Navajo taco had a love child. Turned out to be a giant disk of salty fried thing. Sounds gross, wasn’t bad. We asked a little girl to take a picture and she said she had to go wash her hands first, we watched her walk into the boys bathroom to clean up and found out she was a he….whoops.

The guy in the background of this picture looks like an aged Captain van Trapp. I couldn’t resist stalkerly picture snapping. There are lots of old man that hang around this park that look like they just stepped off a film set. The Schönbrunn grounds are a beautiful place to just be, I hope I can spend a little more time here before I go away.

Wien ist anders.

Yes, I know. I should keep anyone who still knows that this blog exists up to date on my latest travels---blah blah blog. After three days of random milk-run travel and three nights of sleeping on various airport benches

I arrived in Vienna!---But first-----Took an afternoon to re-explore London.

(that’s how everything looks through my rose-colored sunglasses. It was a Sunday morning so I went to church at Westminster Abbey. It was father’s day---Westminster neglected the musical numbers from the primary kids and the chocolate all around.

Classic traveling-solo shot.

I took a walk in Green Park in the early morning on the way to Buckingham Palace and I was suddenly hit with a wave of disbelief and gratitude to find myself cross the pond again. I have lived a truly charmed life in that respect and I stopped that instant and prayed thanks for it. Good thing I did that then because later in the day nothing was open because it was a Sunday morning and it was very cold and strangers kept alternating between hitting on me and asking for money---starting with the cheeky squirrels in that very park---it made me ein bisschen cranky.

Then I got to---well, Helsinki, but THEN I got to VIENNA!

We got here just in time for Corpus Christi so we got to see a procession and it was such an interesting cultural experience. After that, we went walking toward the Hofburg, the big royal palace in the city and we rounded the corner and ran into the same procession again. MADNESS. We’ve crammed a ton into the almost three weeks that I’ve been here and it’s impossible to capture it all here. We’ve been to two Operas and a million museums and eaten way too much ice cream (Zanoni & Zanoni is officially better than Castellos, Schwedenplatz Eiscafe, AND Aida---take note).

Schönbrunn and the Kunsthistoriches have been my favorite places so far. Schönbrunn is the Hapsburg’s summer palace (by the way the last of the Hapsburg died on Tuesday…..). They have outrageously beautiful architecture as well as lovely gardens, but my favorite part was the stories about the royalty that lived there. They have an actual recording of Franz Joseph saying “it has been a pleasure” the way he always did after every meeting he had with anyone. Don’t even get me started on the royal romances. No, but seriously—that could (and probably will be) an entire other blog post.

I’m attempting to take more pictures from here on out and trying hard to keep detailed records of my experiences, I’ll see if I can capture some echo of that here.

What's to come...

This is beautiful (and apparently epic) Vienna, the city that I will call home very soon. I fly out Friday afternoon and suddenly this blog may just come to life again.

Starry Starry Night in the Park with George

*Note: I've randomly decided to start blogging again which I generally only do when I'm overseas somewhere and I want to share my experience with the folks back home. We'll see how long this lasts, my money is on about a week and a half tops.

The other morning my roommate came up the stairs and said "I miss starry starry night." The laptop that I've had since I was seventeen had a skin on it of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Starry Night and I sort became known for it. At Christmas time, my computer kicked the bucket and I had to get a new one (even though my brother ended up picking the bucket back up and selling the repaired computer later) and though I looked for my next painting even before I got the new computer, to this point, the laptop remains bare. I must first explain why I chose this painting to color my life for the years that it did.

In High School, we had a lesson once about the creative process and the things that inspire people. The teacher showed us pictures of the stars and then showed us how Van Gogh had attempted to capture them and then showed us a song that had been written about the painting. This painting, came to represent to me the way that people have the power to inspire each other and the way that expression and art is not only some existential journey, but a lovely manifestation of human interdependence and God's intimate involvement thereof.

My new naked computer has been naked long enough (and not just because it's getting dirty and scratched from the weird places that I use my computer. I had originally chosen a painting called The Terrace at the Sainte Adresse by our own dear Claude Monet, but it stopped speaking to me before I saved up the money to order the skin. So, I've instead chosen to color my life with a piece called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat.

Because I am in theatre and because Stephen Sondheim wrote a musical in the 80s about this painting, most people that I frequently associate with will assume that I chose this because of its connection to my theatrical life. Truly, there are paintings that I find more beautiful, Caspar David Friedrich has done some incredible things and no one deals with light (which I am fascinated by) the way that Rembrandt does. And there are a thousand paintings that have moved me in museums around the world that I may never be able to see again because the artists names and the paintings titles have long since left me.

My connection to this painting cannot be separated from Sondheim and his musical, but it is not based solely on it. We worked briefly with that musical in my musical scene study class and exploring the content of these scenes in depth unearthed things that mean the world to me and to my understanding of art.

I love the something crazed in George's creative process and the way it pulls him to it the way it pulls him to it nearly as strongly as his love draws him to Dot. In a way, I even love the exquisiteness of the resulting heartbreak and I love the tragedy of a man whose life's work came down to making a hat where there never was a hat and he wasn't appreciated for it in his lifetime. I love that though simplistic, there is still something incredible about creation and the wonder of finding there is something there that wasn't there before because of you. In creation, you come close to godhood, but in loving you become a god and I love grappling between those things because love can be so painful too. I love that in the end Dot is surprised by joy, in that though she didn't end up with the person she should've belonged with, there was something beautiful about her having been allowed to know that love like that exists.

Most of all, I love that somebody could look at this painting and never know any of the above or what it meant to the artist. There's likely a thousand heart-wrenching stories that I've seen in strokes and colors and never known that I was seeing them. Though Sondheim took liberties with the facts of the story, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte reminds me that there are a million stories worth telling that are waiting for the right mouth or the right pen or the right heart to tell them.