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.