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: