Day 9 - May 24th - Schonbrunn and Leopold Museum

         Today we actually got up on time and made it to Schonbrunn Palace by 11:00 am; it's the first time we’ve been on time all week, even though we were exhausted and bruised from our bike ride and had a hard time getting out of bed. 

Waiting for Alan...

Still waiting...

Waiting some more... :)

        This palace was merely the summer palace of the Habsburgs, but to me it seemed even more grand and imposing than the Hofburg Palace. We wandered around there for awhile, all of us trying to decide what we wanted to do. I had wanted to go to the famous Zoo there (oldest one in history), but changed my mind after I saw how expensive it was. Suzanne and Heather really wanted to do it though, so they did. Alan and his family went another direction to the mazes, which didn’t sound that interesting to me. So Nicole, Lori, Kaitlyn, Stevie and I walked up the hill to the picnic gazebo called the Gloriette. 

This is the back of Schonbrunn

Oliver waiting in the Zoo cafe for us to finally figure out what we want to do. :)

        After another photo shoot there in front of several fountains, we made it to the top and had a fantastic view of Vienna. 

         Two guys up there asked Lori to take a picture of them for them.  After she took it, one wanted a picture with her. 

     Then they wanted a picture with all of us. 

I conveniently arranged myself next to Lori instead of the mystery guy

          Then they started asking us questions in broken English about where we’re from, where we’re going, why we’re here, how long we’ll be here, etc. They asked if they could see us again, or if we could walk around with them, or eat lunch with them. We tried to tell them we had to meet our professor soon, and stuff like that, but they kept following us. Then they insisted on using our own cameras to take our pictures for us. 

         When we were finally totally creeped out, we hurried back down the hill and dove into the nearest turn with a café we could find. We ended up sitting at the back of the Zoo café for about an hour and a half, all while being paranoid about any men who passed by us who looked even slightly like them. We finally left to walk around the extensive park. Schonbrunn has soooooo much stuff to see: palace, carriage house, desert house, palm house, Gloriette (picnic building/gazebo on a big hill), mazes and labyrinths, zoo, rose gardens, park, cafes and restaurants everywhere, and paths and fountains everywhere you turn. It was amazing and we had a lot of fun exploring the grounds there, and discovering really cool things. 

 

          My favorite was this beautiful, huge, old fountain that was falling apart, and they let it stay that way. For some reason this made it seem so much more genuine to me, and it really hit me how old these things were. 

I thought it was cool that the arch perfectly framed the statue on the hill behind it.

   Once we all had our fill of Schonbrunn, we headed back to the Museum Quarter to use our Leopold museum ticket. We were pretty excited about this one because we heard it had a few pieces from Schielle, Klimt, and Moser. As we walked through it, my camera died, though this was one of the only museums so far that allowed cameras. I saw quite a few beautiful paintings that I really liked, especially Moser’s which I never knew about before this museum. His color technique is amazing and so unique that it kind of inspired me a little and definitely got me excited for my painting class this fall. We also saw a lot of other information about Klimt, like letters and sketches and pictures of him and stuff. The museum seemed in part to be dedicated to him.
 
         After the museum, it was starting to get dark, so we decided to hang out in the Museum Quarter courtyard for awhile to check out the local night life. 

           We found that it basically was just a comedy show, because we ended up watching all the young drunk kids make fools of themselves. After we’d seen enough of that, Heather and Suzanne went home and Kaitlyn led the way for the rest of us as she tried to find a hammock house nearby that she’d heard about. After we couldn’t find it, we stopped for some food and dessert. I got a really good strawberry cake thing. Then we went home. Then we may or may not have also stopped for gelato at our favorite local gelateria.....