Sunday, 4/29
On Sunday, we got up early to go see the Vienna Boys Choir. I met Mandy, Chris, and Aaron by the Opera House and we all walked back to the Hofburg for the performance. Life would have been a lot easier that morning except that there was a huge marathon, so all the streets were blocked off and it was a royal pain trying to navigate through the city using public transportation. Because Barbara had had to be up very early the morning before, she decided to sleep in and was just going to meet up with us later on.
Right outside the Chapel was a woman selling tickets. They were only eight Euro each, so we grabbed up four of them and went out for breakfast behind the Hofburg. There is a cute little café there, which has pretty decent breakfasts. I got some rolls and a mélange (this I will miss sorely when I get back home). The whole breakfast experience was a lot of fun and very chill.
Eventually, we had to leave our chill breakfast place and go to the Hofburg to watch/listen to the Vienna Boys Choir. Once we found our seats, we realized that they were behind a wall, which kind of sucked. I wanted to be able to see the little boys singing – it would have been cute. But I guess it was okay since the service lasted only about 45 minutes and I managed to entertain myself for the majority of the time by watching the orchestra. I know, I’m a very good pseudo-Catholic when I want to be. Anyway, it was just kind of “ehn” since I didn’t get to see anything. But afterwards, we had some spottings of the boys with their families outside the Hofburg, which was pretty awesome. I mean, who really expects to see a boy in a little sailor suit running around Vienna (Austria being landlocked and all).
We also wanted to fit in a morning workout of the Lipizzaner horses, but since it was a Sunday, they only had a performance. There was a man in the lobby selling his tickets, but the others didn’t want to pay that much to see the horses, so I ended up getting an 85 Euro ticket for only 50 and going by myself, which was totally okay. I can’t even begin to explain how excited I was that I was going to get to see the White Stallions.
The performance itself was incredible. Such precision is just amazing. The riders have amazing seats and hardly move at all, even when a horse is giving them a hard time. I even remembered some of the horses from the morning workout I had seen earlier, so I could pick them out. The Airs Above Ground was simply awesome. I can’t even tell you which was my favorite movement, but they were all so impressive. The show began with the flatwork, and progressed to the Airs Above Ground, then culminating in the eight riders that you see in The Miracle of the White Stallions. At one point, during the Airs Above Ground exercises, one of the horses fell over (this was without the riders – the riders were on the horses in the next set). It turned out that he was okay and after a few minutes of gaining his composure, he redid the exercise perfectly. But my heart pounded; let me tell you – I think everybody’s heart missed a beat when he started to tip. The whole performance was out of this world – it was so magical and perfect, and someday, when I go back to Vienna, I’ll watch my horses again.
Once the performance let out, I decided to tour the museum. The guided tour was only about two Euro more, and the guide was really excellent. She told stories and imparted a good amount of information about the horses, the breeding, the training, and even little tricks that the riders use (like making their deerskin breeches a bit wet before they get on the saddle so that they stick even better). She also explained some of the tack, which I found interesting. The saddles are made to fit each horse perfectly, so they don’t need a saddle pad at all. Instead, the cloth is tacked on to the back end of the saddle just for decoration purposes. But each cloth has a meaning. Red is for horses that are proficient in the ground exercises and green is for the horses that do Airs Above Ground. If the pad only has two plain gold stripes, then the rider is a student. Three denotes an Oberreiter and tassels are only used for the Director of the School. The guide also told us about the fire that the SRS experienced in 1992. At some point during the night, a fire broke out in the National Library, which is housed in the same complex as the Stallburg. Since it was so late, only two grooms were on duty, and there were about seventy horses in residence at the time. The fire department told the grooms that the horses had to leave because the fire was too large and the danger too great. Thankfully, the people of Vienna came to help as horses were led from the building, citizens came to hold the horses in the streets. Someone even had the great idea of putting them in the Volksgarten, which is really just down the road from the Stallburg. The Volksgarten has high fences, so the horses could be turned loose in there without the worry that they would escape and possibly get hurt. However, I’m not sure they took into account that these horses are stallions, which are typically more aggressive than mares or geldings. But the Lipizzaner are bred for a quiet disposition, so around noon, when all the horses had been caught and put back into their stalls, which were saved from the fire, it was determined that not a single one of them had a cut or bruise from their frolic in the park. The only collateral damage was to the park – the horses had destroyed the antique rosebeds and turned over several benches while they were pretending to be steeplechasers.
Joining up with Barbara and the boys in a café after the tour, I savored a mélange and Chris was nice enough to pick up the tab for it. Aww. We parted directions again since they wanted to see the Natural History Museum and I had just been there on Friday with the Mandy and Anna. About an hour later, we met up again, and Aaron and I had to wait forever for Chris and Barbara to come out of the museum. *shrug* Chris is a science major, I guess looking at preserved animals in liquid is his thing. Either way, we went to Bettlstudent for dinner before Aaron had to catch a train, and when we dropped him off at the Westbahnhof there was a rather awkward goodbye moment, climaxing when Chris actually pushed him to go to his platform. I think he wanted a hug or something, but for goodness sake, I only knew the boy for a day (and Matt probably would have been perturbed).
After Aaron was back on his way to Berlin via Salzburg, the three of us decided to go home and change (I was in a skirt) and then head over to the Donau Insel to rent some bikes. The Donau Insel is surprisingly easy to get to from my apartment even though it takes a long time – relative to other places I have to go, of course. It was a bit of an adventure figuring out how to actually cross the Donau and get to the island, but we let Chris lead, which is probably why we managed to get there in a reasonable amount of time.
We never actually found the bikes, but we did get some nice Germans or Austrians to take our picture because the classic arm-length shot just wasn’t working. Alright, I’ll just come out and say it – Chris was too tall and he has bad aim. :-)
Wandering around the island was really nice, especially since it was sunset, but people must have thought we were slightly nuts because we had to keep waving our arms and hands in front of our faces to keep the gnat-bug-like-things away. I think I swallowed one. Eww. Then we sat in the grass for a bit and talked about life…or more realistically, Barbara and Chris told me stories about when they shared an apartment last fall and I tried to take artsy pictures. Some of the pictures even came out – how cool. You can see them on my picasa page. I think they’re under Tourist Weekend 1.
April 30, 2007
Today we ventured to the Wienerwald. I’m not totally sure why, since I’m not an outdoorsy person and it seemed like that weekend I did a lot of outdoorsy things, but it was a fun time. Mandy couldn’t come since she had class, so it was just Chris, Barbara and me again. I felt kind of bad because I think Barbara might have wanted some alone time with Chris so they could catch up (they hadn’t seen each other since the end of fall semester).
The Wienerwald was interesting. Very green. And tree-y. And we got lost a lot. Like we walked a whole lot further than we actually intended to, and there were times I was worried that I might not make it back to civilization. Not really, but we all know how I tend to exaggerate. But we did get lost and walk a lot.
There were places to feed wild animals, even though we didn’t see any, outside of pre-teen Austrians on a class trip, and visitors are most definitely not allowed to feed anything!!!! There’re signs all over the place telling you that. I’m sure they say a lot more, like you’ll loose limbs to hungry boars, but we got the jist from the “VERBOTEN” part. Which is really all you need. And a picture. Those help a lot.
Eventually, it was time to find our way back out of the forest and make our triumphant return to civilization…except we missed the bus. Literally. So we got to walk back along the outside of the Wienerwald and find the U-Bahn stop we had gotten off at several hours earlier. And we got to see a construction site – I took pictures for my daddy. Sometimes I shake my head about how much of a Hess I am…this is one of those times.
Then it was back to the Westbahnhof to drop off Chris and IES to drop off Barbara. We wanted to go to dinner since we had gotten a 20 Euro (that’s about $26) coupon to Bettlstudent the night before, but we just couldn’t muster the energy. So we parted company – I, to become a hermit and plan out the extravaganza for the next two days, and Barbara, to work on papers. Just as a quick side note – Austrians have about a bazillion holidays and EVERYBODY celebrates them, which is why I had that Tuesday off (it was May Day). Then my econ professor cancelled class on the second, so I had an uber-long weekend. Unfortunately, the following weekend, I got sick, which really sucked, but I tried to go out and do things anyway. And I succeeded to a certain extent.
May 5, 2007
Even though I was sick last night, I managed to get my act together and meet up with Mandy and Barbara to go to the Naschmarkt. Barbara was going to buy some scarves and wanted some people to come along and bargain for her. Of course, I picked up some too, and so did Mandy. I also bought some really good bread and pretty purple pearls that I’m going to have Mom put a clasp on so I can wear them as a necklace.
After a quick lunch at the Anker in Karlsplatz, we headed to IES to listen to Lindsay’s sophomore recital. She plays the cello and is really super good. I was way impressed.
Then came the highlight of the day. Barbara had been talking about dyeing her hair a different color so Wini was going to help her pick out colors and do it for her. Mandy had previous hair-dyeing experience and I was pretty much there as moral support. Even though Barbara said I made doubtful faces throughout the entire event. I think I need to work on my sympathetic/supportive expressions. However, none of us really took into consideration that the directions would be in German. Since we didn’t want Barbara’s hair to actually die, we had to call in extra help, which is where Chris, Andre’s RA comes in. He lives above Barbara and Adrianne with Seth and Andre. Chris is from Berlin. And he’s self-proclaimed “hot.” *eyebrow* Either way, he read the directions for us and even stayed around to watch the results. I think at one point, we had about four people watching, two taking pictures, and one dyeing Barbara’s hair red. It was quite a production. But it actually looked good (I say actually because I’m really skeptical about hair-dyes and positive results). For the next few days, it was really weird to see Barbara with red hair, but after that, it was weird to see pictures of her from earlier in the semester with brown hair.
To celebrate the successful dyeing of Barbara’s hair, we went to Selbstverständlich. I still wasn’t feeling too good, so I only had a ginger ale, which is really disappointing since I love their schnitzel.
May 7-11, 2007
This was hell week. I didn’t do anything but work and write papers. And go to see “China Shipping,” the play that Sarah had been interning with all semester. It was really well done, and I enjoyed it a lot, especially since Sarah could tell me all about the deeper meanings of the play. But then I had to write a paper on it. Buzz-killer.
