The Prater (and . . . well, yeah)

As they used to say on Monty Python, "And now for something completely different":


Ah, the dangers of computers: the chance for our governments to spy on all the most tawdry and trivial details of our lives, the chance for the machines to rise up against us using our own networks, roving bands of "neo-Luddites," and your daughter getting into your wife's make-up bag. I swear, it took Sophie two minutes of my inattention while at the computer to compose this little work of art. Now, in addition to her other mantras ("Don't eat dirt" and "Don't eat rocks" among them), we've added "Don't play with Mommy's make-up." Violations carry a mandatory sentence of a time-out. (We also have a joke mantra, since Sophie likes to pretend to eat parts of us--a bite of arm here, a fingertip there: "No cannibalism." Is it really a joke, or shouldn't we all have this mantra?)

Anyway, we had a date for the Riesenrad, one of the world's oldest Ferris wheels, at the Prater, a large park that was a former imperial hunting grounds. The Riesenrad figures prominently in the great Vienna film The Third Man, which everyone should see if they haven't already. It was raining just a bit as we set out, so Sophie donned her Euro-strollbrella for the first time.

Luckily, it cleared up almost as soon as it started raining, and we had a nice afternoon. Here's a shot of the Riesenrad from about a half-mile away. The car labeled "5" is like the ones you see on the Ferris wheel itself.



You enter your car with about 15 strangers and you're off.


Here are shots of Sophie with both of us during the ride.


While she was with me, way up at the top, I got Sophie to say that the people on the ground look like ants. (It's a Third Man reference. You've got to see it to get it, see? Don't you wish you'd already?)


Finally, here's a shot of the Riesenrad from the Wurstelprater, the section of the park filled with cheesy county fair-like rides and games.

Sophie was much too small for almost all of the rides. Here's the one she could ride:



And here's the one she really, really wanted to ride. I can't wait until she's old enough

The Kunsthistorisches Museum

On Thursday we visited the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna's mini-Louvre (which is to say a big, general art museum from antiquity to about 1800, but still manageable). We started with the Egyptian materials, which Sophie liked a lot. I don't think she really understood the mummies, but her confusion of animals and human sarcophagi seemed pretty much on the money. We'll see if she remembers the word "hieroglyphics" when we go to the Louvre with the students in September.


This little item, a small ceramic hippo from the 11th or 12th dynasty, sort of caught Sophie's eye, though she likes it more now that we bought her a little model of it as a souvenir of her visit.


In the Portrait Gallery, she found most of the portraits uninteresting at this point. She did like some of the more magnificent things, like a Dürer altar where she thought Christ was swimming, and a gigantic still life with huge fish. But when it came to Raphael's Madonna in the Meadow, which I think may just be the most beautiful painting ever, she kind of just noted in passing that Jesus was naked. Rembrandt? Vermeer? Shrug. Oh, well. There's still time.

She did take to the Arcimboldo allegorical seasons, especially the most approachable, Summer:


I was truly pleased that she liked the Bruegels, since I use them in my Humanities 120 class. I think these amazing early scenes of the everyday life of common people are just amazing, and there's so much activity from real life that Sophie found them pretty interesting. Here are her two favorites, The Peasant Wedding and The Peasant Dance:


She even agreed with me that the children Bruegel painted in the lower left of the painting below looked like little adults. (Of course, at this point, if I told her that we lived on a planet called Mars, she might agree with me about that, too.)


All in all, she lasted about two hours (with a break for some "bubbly water"--carbonated mineral water--which she likes quite a bit). Hooray!


But now it's time for dinner and a rest:

Sophie's First Movie in a Theater and More Parks

Last Sunday was very rainy (it's been a pretty rainy trip actually), and there's an English-language movie theater just down the block from where we're staying, so we decided to take Sophie to her very first movie in the theater, Kung Fu Panda.


She's seen her fair share of movies, most of them many times (her all-time favorite being Monsters, Inc., for which I'm eternally grateful--any respite from Finding Nemo is welcome in my book). She usually stays interested for 30-45 minutes before her attention wanders and she begins to play with some toys. This was mostly the case with Kung Fu Panda, though I think the size of the screen, the sound, and the darkness of the theater helped keep her attention even longer. She squirmed quite a bit, but she liked the panda character a lot and the popcorn maybe even more. Some of the more physical comedy she understood completely, and other times, when people in the theater laughed, she responded with a fake "HA-HA-HA" or even one "HO-HO-HO." Naturally as soon as the end credits began to roll, Sophie asked to see it again. We're looking forward to Wall-E's European release at the end of September.

After the movie, the rain had cleared a bit, so we hopped on the subway to see the Danube. The river has been manipulated so much by people over the course of the 2000-year history of human settlement around the area of Vienna that it has many different channels today (one minor one goes right past the Innere Stadt--the old, formerly walled city center). The pictures below show the quieter of two main channels of the river a little further out. The other of the main two channels is the one used for shipping, obviously, silly pontoon bridges not being very practical for international river-based commerce.


Vienna is situated right at the edge of the Great Hungarian Plain (or the Pannonian Plain--I'm not really clear on which exactly), which is an immense flat area of the continent. You can see in the picture below some of the Viennese hills showing just how much on the edge of this plain the city is.


The trip to the Danube went so well that we started visiting Vienna's parks after dinner if the weather was nice and Sophie's mood allowed for it. Here are a few shots from the Volksgarten, a park on the grounds of the Hofburg, the Habsburg's city palace (see the entry from July 21).

The park is filled with rosebushes, which drew Sophie like a bee. After a short lesson about thorns, she kept her respectful distance.



Below is Sophie with her sweater on backwards pretending to be a ghost. Mindy noted today that she's probably one of the only little kids who, when she wakes up, reports good dreams filled with spiders (thanks to Charlotte's Web) and monsters (Monsters, Inc.).


We snapped a photo of ourselves near one of the park's fountains. I think it's a great picture of us even if Sophie has her eyes closed. She's still getting the hang of saying "cheese."


Going to the parks after dinner has a very calming effect on all of us (in a very 19th-century way), I think. Mindy has been really struck by the use of parks in Vienna; I think it's because they are quite lovely but also because almost all of the 1.6 million Viennese live in apartments and feel a real need for some green space. At any rate, the visits tend to knock Sophie out, as this photo attests:

The Naschmarkt and Schönbrunn

We're nearing the end of our time in Vienna, which has been very nice. I'll post some photos and updates today and tomorrow.

Last weekend we went to the Naschmarkt, the large, open-air market where you can get just about any food you might want.


We picked up a few items we hadn't found yet in Strasbourg (black beans and sweet Indonesian soy sauce among them) and generally marveled at all the produce, spices, treats, and people there.


Although we're in a great location, especially for the work I had to do here, Vienna is large enough that we use the subway almost every day. Sophie loves riding on the "choo-choo trains," especially since the station near us lets us first ride an elevator ("Hold my hand, daddy. I won't be scared."), then an escalator. Here are a few photos waiting on the platform for the next train.



These were taken the day we went to Schönbrunn, the Habsburgs' summer palace that used to be in the country but is now within the city limits.



We walked around the grounds a little before visiting the former Imperial Menagerie, now the Tiergarten (zoo), which claims to be the oldest in the world (opened to "respectably-dressed" visitors since 1778). Here are a few shots on the palace grounds:




Inside the zoo, Sophie took to the rhinos first, enjoyed the penguins, watched the tiger sleep, found the panda just a touch rude for refusing to face us, and thought the koala was cute if petite. Here she is with the rhinos (really, I'm trying to get her to look at the animals and stop insisting on talking about their poop):


And here she is with the penguins, who really seemed to understand her (although their poop remained a mystery):


Sophie's always been a talker, but now she's reached that stage during which she is quite insistent that you listen to her story--all of it, in all of its details--and concentrate on nothing else. Here she's telling me all about the animals we've already seen (and about their poop, too, no doubt):


No visit to the zoo, we're learning (or more likely, re-learning, since we were probably like this, too), is complete without some fake animals, too. First, the fiberglass one (only 0.50 €) . . .

. . . and then the concrete one (free!):


After a long day of palace grounds- and zoo-visiting, Sophie was ready to go back home on the subway. She wanted to sit on a seat by herself, and agreed to pose for a photo to help us all remember this important first:

Discovering Parks

To keep Sophie busy and active during the day, we've started taking her to parks. We did this before when we lived in Danville, but not as consistently since we had a yard for her to play in. European parks, I find, are pretty similar--they consist of at least two levels of play, one area for little kids and one for older kids and they almost always have some sort of sandbox. Every kid in the park has their own pail and shovel, if not other tools. We bought a set for Sophie in Strasbourg (which was really meant for bathtub play), and I remember wondering what beach was near enough for them to have so many sand toys. We left her pail in Strasbourg, and quickly realized that she'd need one here in Vienna. There's a lovely little park just a block from our apartment, and Sophie can spend hours in the sandbox. Here are some pictures of Sophie playing at this park (which is located directly under an anti-aircraft tower that has been converted into an aquarium...weird).


Sophie decided that she'd be like the big girls and just sit in a little tunnel:

And here is Sophie's beloved sandbox:

Two Weeks in Vienna

Thanks to the college and a research grant they gave Ian, we have been able to visit Vienna again for two weeks. We arrived the Sunday before last and will leave next Sunday. Ian has been spending time at the library doing some research, but he's had time to introduce Sophie to one of his favorite places in the world. I was here for two weeks last year with him, and can see why he loves it so much!

Sophie took her first-ever real train ride for this trip, and the first leg of the journey was on the famous TGV:

We've been really busy trying to take Sophie to places that we think she'll enjoy. She thinks that all churches here are castles, so we took her to a real castle, the Hofburg. Here are Sophie and I posing in front of the gates:


Funnily enough, they're having a King Tut exhibit there, and Sophie was mesmerized by the gigantic statue of Anubis outside. (Yes, that's her posing like him by his huge foot. Although she would pose next to him, she wasn't all that sure about touching him and only touched his foot after I did.)

Here we are posing next to different statues and doors within the palace grounds:



Ian took us to the site of some of the Roman ruins of Vienna. Sophie thought they were great, but kept calling the holes "elevators" for some reason. Somehow I don't think she got the idea about how old they were!

We've also visited the zoo, the Naschmarkt, and several parks, so we'll post pictures of those trips in the days to come!