Austria trip day three
Today was day three. These posts are unedited, so I use the same words more than I ought to.
I'm also working on getting photos up. You can see them in my Austria folder on flickr, which is here. If it's mostly empty, check back in a little while.
I stayed up later than I should have writing the beginning of a new story. I woke up early and wrote some more and ate some toast.
Dad and I walked to a camera store near the apartment. We passed a Hello Kitty store called Kitty World. If it'd been open, I would have gone in. Hello Kitty is my sole girly weakness.
We also passed a lot of street art. Vienna has layers: old architecture in yellow brick reminiscent of Howl's Moving Castle, new buildings from Brutalist to modern, crawls of vines and roof gardens, wide splotches of graffiti like colorful mold. The collage, taken as a whole, is enchanting. I don't know if I'd want to live here, but it certainly is nice to look at.
Dad and I bought a card reader and a universal battery charger and walked back and talked science fiction. We might write something together. I really needed to write something that wasn't the Stark and Milgram story, I think. I still need to.
After dad and I got back, he and I and mum and Isaac took the U-Bahn to the outskirts of Vienna, where we attempted to navigate a German cafe menu. I wound up eating a lot of bread because I couldn't figure out what most of the other things were.
Then we walked to Schönbrunn Palace. Schönbrunn Palace is a huge rococo piece of stone that the royal family of Austria, the Habsburgs, used to live in. And when I say huge, I don't mean kind of big. I mean 1,400 rooms. I mean opulent. I mean gilded, ornate moldings in every room.
This place was ridiculous. We saw 40 of the rooms while we were there, which was more than enough. The rooms are wallpapered mostly in brocade, and the floors are either carpeted in red or set in hardwood like the top of an inlaid jewelry box. The furniture is wood with thick, hard cushions in various pastels and dark hues. The ceilings are cathedral height, which makes the smaller rooms claustrophobic, taller than they are wide.
The walls and doorways are very thick. They're thick because the walls are hollow. Inside of the walls are tunnels and passageways for servants, as well as a steam-based heating system so there didn't have to be fireplaces in all of the rooms. There is no plumbing.
We went through one of the ballrooms on our tour through the palace. The brochure said that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev met in that ballroom during the Vienna summit. It didn't look like how I imagined the Vienna summit did. It was yards long and yards wide and painted white with curlicues of gold trim all over everything. Tall mirrors were set into the walls every couple of feet. There were two separate paintings of religious and military scenes on the ceiling, which were done in such a perspective that you felt like you were looking up at them from within a deep, wide hole. There were two crystal chandeliers with 72 candles in each of them. I don't know why they had the Vienna summit there. I would not have had the Vienna summit there. I mean, I'd probably have had it somewhere equally ridiculous but in a very different way, like some dinky little cafe somewhere in the depths of Paris, but really. Schönbrunn Palace is such a place of excess. It seems too shallow and vain for talking serious things.
I didn't entirely like Schönbrunn, just because it was such a hulking mass of other people's ill-spent money, but it was very pretty. I wondered a lot about the people who lived and worked there, especially when I was out on the grounds. A lot of the women got married when they were fifteen or sixteen so they could give birth to heirs and control more of Europe or something.
The grounds of Schönbrunn are even bigger than Schönbrunn is. They are so big it is preposterous. There is an orangery and a formal garden and a hill leading up to a hunting lodge that looks like an M.C. Escher drawing and three labyrinths and at least one other garden I've forgotten the name of. Oh, and a fountain with maybe thirty marble figures in it called the Neptune Fountain. The pond below the Neptune Fountain has ducks in it. Austrian ducks look the same as British ducks look the same as Philadelphian ducks look the same as New Englander ducks. As far as I can tell, ducks are an universal constant.
The view from the hunting lodge at the top of the hill showed all of Schönbrunn Palace and all of its grounds and most of Austria. There was a red crane in the distance, one so big I couldn't tell how big it was in relation to the buildings around it. The people on the grounds looked like model train miniatures or candy sprinkles. Everyone was dressed in modern clothes and modern colors, of course, but I couldn't help but envision what the gardens must have looked like during a big party in the 1800s. I imagine there were a lot of poofy dresses and champagne flutes and gossip, though I don't know if champagne flutes were even a thing in nineteenth-century Austria. Or champagne at all, for that matter.
Most of Schönbrunn is zoos and touristy trains and labyrinths and daintily carved slabs of rock, but one thing we weren't expecting was the apple strudel show, or apfelstrudelshow. That was. . .well, what would you expect from something called the apple strudel show?
The show was in the basement of one of the side buildings in the palace. People in aprons handed out apple strudel samples, and then my family and a bunch of other tourists watched a round-faced woman in a chef's hat explain in German and English how to make an apple strudel.
She demonstrated. Part of making apple strudel, it turns out, is spinning out a big thin circle of dough like a pizza. She spun it first with her fists and eventually with her elbows, until it was the size of an unfolded sheet of newspaper. She made silly faces whenever she noticed someone was taking her picture. I was dehydrated and kind of miserable, but that was pleasingly distracting.
After Schönbrunn Palace, we took the U-Bahn back to the apartment and then went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. I got pizza, because pizza is hard to fuck up no matter what country you're in. I've gotten pretty good at ordering things in German. The German class I took must have stuck more than I thought it did. A lot of it is coming back, at least. I keep recognizing words I don't expect to.
When we finished eating, mum took Isaac and me to get gelato while dad went in search of a bankomat. I had Nutella and Holler-Limette, which tasted kind of like lime and kind of like those candied bits of gelatinous stuff you find in fruit cake. It had those bits in it, at least. The green ones.
Then we walked back to the apartment. Now I'm sitting in the open-air room and uploading photos to Flickr. I am very tired. I've felt very gender-dysphoric the past few days, which has made things harder than they needed to be. I would much rather focus on what's going on around me than on how wrong it feels to have breasts.
But I'll be okay, you know? I'm having fun and experiencing a lot of new things.
Tomorrow we're going to some more museums, I think. We shall see. I'm looking forward to it. I think I'll wear sideburns.
I'm also working on getting photos up. You can see them in my Austria folder on flickr, which is here. If it's mostly empty, check back in a little while.
I stayed up later than I should have writing the beginning of a new story. I woke up early and wrote some more and ate some toast.
Dad and I walked to a camera store near the apartment. We passed a Hello Kitty store called Kitty World. If it'd been open, I would have gone in. Hello Kitty is my sole girly weakness.
We also passed a lot of street art. Vienna has layers: old architecture in yellow brick reminiscent of Howl's Moving Castle, new buildings from Brutalist to modern, crawls of vines and roof gardens, wide splotches of graffiti like colorful mold. The collage, taken as a whole, is enchanting. I don't know if I'd want to live here, but it certainly is nice to look at.
Dad and I bought a card reader and a universal battery charger and walked back and talked science fiction. We might write something together. I really needed to write something that wasn't the Stark and Milgram story, I think. I still need to.
After dad and I got back, he and I and mum and Isaac took the U-Bahn to the outskirts of Vienna, where we attempted to navigate a German cafe menu. I wound up eating a lot of bread because I couldn't figure out what most of the other things were.
Then we walked to Schönbrunn Palace. Schönbrunn Palace is a huge rococo piece of stone that the royal family of Austria, the Habsburgs, used to live in. And when I say huge, I don't mean kind of big. I mean 1,400 rooms. I mean opulent. I mean gilded, ornate moldings in every room.
This place was ridiculous. We saw 40 of the rooms while we were there, which was more than enough. The rooms are wallpapered mostly in brocade, and the floors are either carpeted in red or set in hardwood like the top of an inlaid jewelry box. The furniture is wood with thick, hard cushions in various pastels and dark hues. The ceilings are cathedral height, which makes the smaller rooms claustrophobic, taller than they are wide.
The walls and doorways are very thick. They're thick because the walls are hollow. Inside of the walls are tunnels and passageways for servants, as well as a steam-based heating system so there didn't have to be fireplaces in all of the rooms. There is no plumbing.
We went through one of the ballrooms on our tour through the palace. The brochure said that John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev met in that ballroom during the Vienna summit. It didn't look like how I imagined the Vienna summit did. It was yards long and yards wide and painted white with curlicues of gold trim all over everything. Tall mirrors were set into the walls every couple of feet. There were two separate paintings of religious and military scenes on the ceiling, which were done in such a perspective that you felt like you were looking up at them from within a deep, wide hole. There were two crystal chandeliers with 72 candles in each of them. I don't know why they had the Vienna summit there. I would not have had the Vienna summit there. I mean, I'd probably have had it somewhere equally ridiculous but in a very different way, like some dinky little cafe somewhere in the depths of Paris, but really. Schönbrunn Palace is such a place of excess. It seems too shallow and vain for talking serious things.
I didn't entirely like Schönbrunn, just because it was such a hulking mass of other people's ill-spent money, but it was very pretty. I wondered a lot about the people who lived and worked there, especially when I was out on the grounds. A lot of the women got married when they were fifteen or sixteen so they could give birth to heirs and control more of Europe or something.
The grounds of Schönbrunn are even bigger than Schönbrunn is. They are so big it is preposterous. There is an orangery and a formal garden and a hill leading up to a hunting lodge that looks like an M.C. Escher drawing and three labyrinths and at least one other garden I've forgotten the name of. Oh, and a fountain with maybe thirty marble figures in it called the Neptune Fountain. The pond below the Neptune Fountain has ducks in it. Austrian ducks look the same as British ducks look the same as Philadelphian ducks look the same as New Englander ducks. As far as I can tell, ducks are an universal constant.
The view from the hunting lodge at the top of the hill showed all of Schönbrunn Palace and all of its grounds and most of Austria. There was a red crane in the distance, one so big I couldn't tell how big it was in relation to the buildings around it. The people on the grounds looked like model train miniatures or candy sprinkles. Everyone was dressed in modern clothes and modern colors, of course, but I couldn't help but envision what the gardens must have looked like during a big party in the 1800s. I imagine there were a lot of poofy dresses and champagne flutes and gossip, though I don't know if champagne flutes were even a thing in nineteenth-century Austria. Or champagne at all, for that matter.
Most of Schönbrunn is zoos and touristy trains and labyrinths and daintily carved slabs of rock, but one thing we weren't expecting was the apple strudel show, or apfelstrudelshow. That was. . .well, what would you expect from something called the apple strudel show?
The show was in the basement of one of the side buildings in the palace. People in aprons handed out apple strudel samples, and then my family and a bunch of other tourists watched a round-faced woman in a chef's hat explain in German and English how to make an apple strudel.
She demonstrated. Part of making apple strudel, it turns out, is spinning out a big thin circle of dough like a pizza. She spun it first with her fists and eventually with her elbows, until it was the size of an unfolded sheet of newspaper. She made silly faces whenever she noticed someone was taking her picture. I was dehydrated and kind of miserable, but that was pleasingly distracting.
After Schönbrunn Palace, we took the U-Bahn back to the apartment and then went to an Italian restaurant for dinner. I got pizza, because pizza is hard to fuck up no matter what country you're in. I've gotten pretty good at ordering things in German. The German class I took must have stuck more than I thought it did. A lot of it is coming back, at least. I keep recognizing words I don't expect to.
When we finished eating, mum took Isaac and me to get gelato while dad went in search of a bankomat. I had Nutella and Holler-Limette, which tasted kind of like lime and kind of like those candied bits of gelatinous stuff you find in fruit cake. It had those bits in it, at least. The green ones.
Then we walked back to the apartment. Now I'm sitting in the open-air room and uploading photos to Flickr. I am very tired. I've felt very gender-dysphoric the past few days, which has made things harder than they needed to be. I would much rather focus on what's going on around me than on how wrong it feels to have breasts.
But I'll be okay, you know? I'm having fun and experiencing a lot of new things.
Tomorrow we're going to some more museums, I think. We shall see. I'm looking forward to it. I think I'll wear sideburns.