Spring has Gesprungen

Today was a very nice spring day in Vienna. The temperature reached 13 degrees celcius. I went for a walk and did some shopping on Stephansplatz, which is a bit of a zoo on Saturdays ...understandably. It's just a little difficult to dodge horse-drawn carriages.

Pictures from my district around the canal:

Sigmund Freud Park

The Votivkirche

Shottentor/Universitaet Area

(Mostly) Tourists on Stephansplatz

And now, Your Moment of Communism:

(Notice how I'm a safe distance from the demonstration, Central College officials...)

Partly-Cloudy Pictures

So I finally had some time to go take general pictures of sunny Vienna, and then the clouds rolled it. Luckily, the sun poked through the clouds just a bit for some of these photos.

These are pictures of the route I take to get to the nearest U-Bahn station, which I take every day to school or wherever. I leave my district when I cross the bridge, then I walk down an Allee to get to the U-Bahn entrance.

The Danube Canal

An Allee

The First Sign of Spring

A Strassen-Bahn

On Monday night, I went with my classmates from the Musikseminar to a string quartet concert in the Brahms Saal. This was before the concert...when I assumed I could get away with some non-flash photography. The quartet played pieces from Haydn, Beethoven, Debussy and Puccini.

Fun with Intercultural Communication

Me (at a small food stand where Turkish music is playing): Entschuldigung, was sind Maroni? (Excuse me, what are Maroni?)

Young guy working at the stand: Sie sind ein euro achtzig. (They are 1,80 euro.)

Me: Sind sie Gemuese, Nusse oder was? (Are they vegetables, nuts or something?)

Guy: (smiles, looks confused, serves someone else a bag of 8 Maroni)

Me: OK, Ich probiere sie. Ich moechte acht bitte. (Ok, I will try them. I'll have eight please.)

Guy: (puts the mystery food into a paper sack) Shoene Musik, ja? (Nice music, yes?)

Me: Danke, Tchiuss.



So...I tried the Maroni. They had the texture of a potato and a nut at the same time and were a little sweet--not very good, to be honest. I was just intrigued by these things I saw roasting every day. I found out that Maroni are chestnuts, which I had suspected, since that's one of the only nuts I've heard of that people roast themselves. (Do you know anyone who owns a honey-roaster?)

These pictures are not of the stand I went to. I got them from Wikipedia, where they are not copyrighted (in case anyone is wondering...). The first picture is of a stand in Istanbul, and the second is from Melbourne.

The guy I bought the Chestnuts from from either: 1. didn't know how to describe them to me in German, 2. thought I didn't know how to ask the right question, or 3. thought I was "taking the Mickey out of him" as my roommate, with all of her British-English training, said.

In honor of the Rektor (the Dean) and all s/he does for the education of the students at the Uni Wien, there is Rektorstag tomorrow, so all educational activities will be temporarily suspended. :) Actually, I think there's a speech or several meetings going on. I still have my grammar & stylistics course with Central College tomorrow, but that's in the evening, so I'm going to start reading one of the ten books I have for my literature course. (Most of them are short.)

So far, everything is going well. I understood about 75% of my Education & Anthropology lecture today, which is great, considering that I understood 40% last week. I quickly learned that I need to sit in the front to hear, especially with some professors who just speak loud enough for the first three rows to hear them.

I've also made some comprehension progress in the TV world. I have no problem understanding Spongebob Squarepants (Spongebob Schwammkopf) in German, but I'm still working on Grey's Anatomy. Dr. Stevens speaks too fast. :)

Stephansplatz and Tiergarten Shoenbrunn

Despite what these pictures show, we've actually had mostly sunny days this week. I promise to get out and take some more sunny pictures soon...if the decent weather holds up.

These pictures are from the remainder of our tour and my Sunday trip to Europe's oldest zoo. It was originally built to be a animal garden for the imperial family in the 1750s. The weather was pretty cold, windy and rainy that day so it wasn't the most comfortable outing. The animals, however, were interesting. The zoo has been in the news a bit recently because one of the pandas had a baby, which we got to see.

The Museumsquartier:

Stephansplatz

Stephanskirche

This is an Allee on the way to the Tiergarten, which is a long parkway with trees. If you have seen the classic movie The Third Man, you may recognize this kind of path.

an English garden on the way to the zoo

The Tropikhaus

ein Pandabär

a human child on a fake panda

Panda-Mom with Panda-Baby

Baby Giraffe

The Petting Zoo

This tiger can shoot laser beams from its eyes.

A bit of Florida...in Vienna

Rainy Vienna Pictures

The first couple days in Vienna have been rainy and windy. We got some sunshine yesterday, but it's still windy. From what I've heard, that's probably not going to stop. Ever. It might calm down, but there are no mountains to protect us.

I went to my first couple classes. The Central College Lit class was pretty easy to understand buy my lecture at the Uni Wien and my art class were harder to follow. I'm sure this will get better over time.

On Saturday, I visited the Shoenbrunn Tiergarten, which I've heard is one of the oldest zoos in the world. I will post pictures of that when my camera starts cooperating again (that will probably be when I delete the short films off of it.)


This was my first Viennese meal: Wiener Schnitzel mit Pommes Frites.



This is the main university building....behind a tree.



Beethoven lived here:


Schubert lived here:


A typical Viennese side-street:




This is an auction house, but it looks more like a fitness club to me:



Franz-Josef? Someone important nonetheless...



A well with Sirens--the Greek kind:


Our tour guide told us that Trotsky and Stalin met at this cafe:


Because of this Spanish Riding School, Vienna is probably the only large city where one can smell horses in the middle of town.