My family doesn't really like audio guide tours. Two people in particular REALLY don't like them (cough. rachel. cough. michael.)  So when they found out we were doing a FORTY room tour with an audio guide, faces fell. But it turned out to be one of the better tours we've been on.  As Michael said, "When there was nothing to say about a room, they just told you to go to the next one. It was great."

You weren't allowed to take pictures on the tour, but I got a few from the internet of our favorite parts. 

The ballroom

  

 

The room that looked like painted porcelain 

 

A random picture of some room in the palace

 

You get the general idea. It was pretty and elegant and interesting. I enjoyed the paintings. There were loads of Maria Theresa and her family, and since I'm reading a biography (In Destiny's Hands by Vook), I felt like I knew what was going on. 

After, we had a snack and headed to the maze!

 

     

 

At Schönbrunn, they had a nifty train that drove around.

   

 

Sadly for us, we ran out of time to take the train the whole way around, but we had fun while we could! We paid our money and got hand stamps.

 

 

We had some fun waiting for the train ride to start.

 

And then it started! We saw the eagle at the entrance.

 

The greenhouses in the garden. (Never did get to tour the gardens...)

 

 

And very cool shadows on a wall cast by a row of trees. 

 

We made it as far as the Gloriette, got out to take pictures, and then had to walk back to the palace for our 2:30 tour.  Since the train closed at 6:00 and we wanted to go to the zoo, we never had a chance to get back on. But, that's okay.  We still like trains. 

What's a gloriette?  That's a valid question. I wondered the same thing myself. Gloriette is French for "little glory" (no, really?). It's a building in a garden and/or on a high elevation. They can be just to look at or might be picnic pavilions or things like that.  It's the rich man's gazebo! 

 

The Gloriette at Schönbrunn was built in 1775. The family used it as a party room for dinners and as a breakfast room. 

 

  

 

It was fun to picture all those royals and their friends in fancy clothes traipsing up the hill to have croissants and chocolate. 

 

The building was dedicated as "A Monument to Just War." In other words, "To wars that bring peace."  

 

 

There were some great views from the top! (in the picture with James, you can see Schönbrunn Palace in the center.) 

        

 

 I like playing with exposure!

 

I was so grateful for a day of good weather!

        

One day, I decided to pull out my Vienna guidebook and see what we hadn't seen.  I came up with a list of about 15 things. "Wow, that's a lot." I thought we should try another trip to Vienna, and the #1 destination on my list was Schönbrunn Palace.

 

     

 

What is this place, you may ask? Well, it's a big, yellow palace. (Oh, those wacky Habsburgs and their love of yellow...)  It was where a lot of the Austrian ruling family lived in the summer including Maria Theresa (about whom I am reading a biography).

It's where Marie Antoinette (of France) grew up. She was Maria Theresa's daughter. 

 

Also, Empress Elizabeth (known as Sisi) lived there. She's an interesting duck for sure. 

 

"Schönbrunn" means "beautiful spring" as in "there's a well of water in the front yard, and it is awfully pretty" sort of spring. 

 

They had fountains, but I don't think they were the spring.

 

How many rooms would you guess are in this palace? (That's the family by the first set of steps!)

 

If you guessed 1,441, you are RIGHT! 

 

The palace was laid out with the palace and walking area. (This is the back of the palace. The "ruin" are the statues along the sides.)

 

 I am not sure where the "Roman Ruin" was (something they built to look like a Roman ruin, but was not at all.) This is a picture from the internet.

 

Off to the right of the "ruin" was a maze. Then, you'd hit a fountain, a small, steep hill, and then the Gloriette.

 

We had a royally good time!

 

The skyline of Linz is dotted with many church spires. But one stands out. It's the Mariendome or the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.

 

The building was begun in 1862 and was dedicated in 1924. At the time, it was the largest building project in Europe.

       

 

Peter holding the keys to the kingdom looks over the front door. 

  

 

One of the first things you see upon entering are stone carvings (or maybe just plaster to look like stone?) of the 14 Stations of the Cross. 

   

 

 

This place seats 20,000 people!! Temple University's football stadium seats 20,000.  Lakewood Church, Joel Osteen's Huston mega-church, seats 16,800. Willow Creek Community Church (Bill Hybels) only seats 7,095.  In other words, it's a HUGE church. (But Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome is by far bigger.) 

          

 

I can't say the church was particularly "pretty," although there were lots of stained glass windows depicting events from the history of the Catholic church. 

            

 

There were also some "design only" stained glass. (That's not really a term!)

 

Now, don't go believing that I thought the place was ugly. It was just that it was more austere and imposing than other churches we have visited. 

 

       

 

We were supposed to go on a tour to the bell tower, but we found out the only way to do that was to pay for a one-hour tour all in German. So we opted out. I am sure we'll climb another bell tower someday!

 

 

With the Penguins in the playoffs back home, it only seemed right to talk about our adopted town of Linz and their hockey team, The Black Wings.  

 

On April 2, they won the Austrian Hockey Championships!

 

Saturday night, they had a big rally in the Hauptplatz (the city square). The girls and I went to see what was going on. 

   

They had a big screen showing the team playing hockey. Some of the players spoke. 

But by the time we got there, mostly it was people standing around drinking and smoking and littering. 

 

       

 

We bought some t-shirts and headed home.

 

May the Penguins be as successful! 

What's a "warte"?  It's a lookout tower. I prefer to call it a Rapunzel Tower. And guess what? We have one about a 20 minute walk from our apartment!

Libby and I decided to find this tower and see if it really existed. We hiked up the road behind our house. (It's all uphill!) We came to a lovely park with all the lovely trees and bushes and grass you'd hope to see. The grass here is SO green! It's like it was Photoshopped. 

 

We came to a playground, but still, no Rapunzel tower. 

 

Then we saw a building. Could this be it? It appeared to be a prayer shrine thing for Saint Barbara. You could light candles and such.

 

It had some pretty views of Linz, so maybe?

 

But the path kept going on, so we did. And we were rewarded. There it was!

     

 

We climbed the spiral staircase

 

 

and were rewarded with a wonderful, yet cloudy view of Linz. 

 

And then it started raining.  So we went home and planned to come back another day. 

Which we did.

       

 

On our second trip, we discovered the exercise trail and had fun with that!

Station One--Hug a Tree

 

 

Station Two--Run through Swinging Tires

 

Station Three--Hang Upside Down and Determine if "Thumbs Up" Should Be "Thumbs Down"

 

Station Four--Ride a Seatless Unicycle

    

 

Also, just in case you were wondering, Austrians don't know how to take turns and wait in line. Not at all. 

It's Spring! Austria didn't get weeks of 70 and 80 degree weather like PA did. We have had a slow-and-steady sort of spring here. And now, it's pretty!

The flowers are starting to bloom.

 

      

 

The trees and bushes are wearing flowers.

      

 

And even the Nightlock is ready for action! (ha ha)

 

The trees are happy it is spring!

 

(Some of the houses look like they are ALWAYS ready for spring!)

 

Libby and I have enjoyed several walks. 

      

 

Happy Spring to YOU!

This was the first Easter my family has not all been together. I am so glad my mom had Nathan and David over for lunch and overdosed them on candy and all that.  

The kids woke up to their Easter plates. Meager, yes, but that's how it is in healthy Austria.

 

When we lived in England, we didn't have basket for Easter, so I used plates. We liked it so well that we do it every year now. 

 

Even James got a treat. 

 

Then it was off to lunch at the Moores. They are a delightful American family we met at church.  They invited two other American families over, and we had such a wonderful time visiting and eating and sharing stories. 

 

        

 

And it snowed! When we were in England for Easter, it snowed then, too. It's like a tradition now.

 

This is the closest I got to a family picture this Easter. Oh, well.  

 

21 more days of European adventures!

The second museum we attended was the Neues Museum. Berlin has loads of museums, but we picked this one because it had Egyptian stuff. And it's always cool to look at mummies.

This museum, like the Pergamon, is on Museum Island in Berlin. I am not sure if it is still a literal island or not, but the Spree River runs by it, at least on one side. They seemed to be overly protective in this museum. For example, we were on the landing of the stairs, and Michael's had brushed a column (not an exhibit, a column on the stairs), and a museum person came over and told him not to touch it.  Weird. 

Anyhow, here's what we saw!

This is actual, Egyptian papyrus preserved. 

  

 

 These are the death masks of some random Egyptian women. 

   

 

 

Obligatory Egyptian cat idol photo

 

 

I liked this one because instead of just sitting side-by-side, they are affectionate in their pose. Or at least she is. 

   

 

A number of the artifacts still had the original paint, which was neat. 

  

    

Hee hee

The BIG DEAL thing at the Neues Museum was the bust of Nefertiti.  They had two guards when I was there. They keep it in this room.

Absolutely NO photos were allowed, so I swiped all my images from the internet.

       

Why is she such a big deal? Well, she was supposed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. What I find interesting, though, is she was the wife of Pharaoh Akenaten. Who is that guy? Well, you may not have known that one Egyptian pharaoh decided that there was only one, true god. They called him "Aten" or "The Sun Disc." He had his people destroy their polytheistic gods and shrines and all and worship one god.  After he died, the people went back to their old ways of worship, but I found it fascinating that this one man said there was only one god.  Also, Tutankahmen, King Tut, was Akenaten's son.  Nefertiti was not King Tut's mother, though. She had six daughters. 

There were also Greek and Roman things there. 

Plato? Socrates? Moron! (I know it's not an exact quote...)

 

 

This sculpture was called "The Face of a Barbarian." I liked it. 

 

I saw these pots and said, "Oh, they look like they have faces and belly buttons!

 

    

Then I realized they were called "Anthropomorphic Pots." Duh.

 

There was also some Middle Ages stuff. 

Dead people tomb

 

And this was cool. 

 

They dug up this old church and found over 100 pots in the floor in a stytem of channels and chambers with the open part to the top. They also found them in the walls with the open part facing the center of the church.  They figured out (being intelligent archaeologists and also because someone wrote about it in a medieval document) that these jars were a medieval sound system!