Scaling new heights!-Wednesday in Vienna

Now even in a beautiful,museum and art filled city like Vienna there has to be some down time for a 12 year old boy, even one as interested in that stuff as Danny is. On our wanderings on Friday we had come across a climbing facility tucked into a little alley of a turn of the century street in the inner city and thought "cool"! So I decided that after Danny's phenomenal breakfast we would track it down and he could climb. It was easy enough to get to and we were able to get the gear right there (shoes required, helmet not!) Unfortunately I don't know a "beele on,on beele" from a weiner schnitzel, so he was confined to the free climbing walls. I was feeling bad when he told me that this was actually what he liked to do best, not the climbing with the ropes. Yay! So it was all good, in fact, awesome! I was in charge of moral support and photography, he was in charge of climbing. And climbing,and climbing and climbing! It was cool to watch him when he would fall off, study the holds, and get back on the wall, determined to make it past the tricky part, even if it took him 6-8 trys-determination, that's what I loved seeing! He climbed for three hours!! And in between photo's and hurrahs, I read my juicy,trashy British chick book. Talk about a Win-Win!

All that climbing burned off so many calories there was now room for a little more culture! We walked over to the Museumplein and we to the the Kunsthistorisches Museum which is housed in its festive palatial building on Ringstraße, crowned with an octagonal dome. It was opened around 1891 at the same time as the Naturhistorisches Museum, by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary. The two museums have identical exteriors and face each other across Maria-Theresien-Platz. Both buildings were built between 1872 and 1891 according to plans drawn up by Gottfried Semper and Karl Freiherr von Hasenauer.
The two Ringstraße museums were commissioned by the Emperor in order to find a suitable shelter for the Habsburgs' formidable art collection and to make it accessible to the general public. The facade was built of sandstone. The building is rectangular in shape, and topped with a dome that is 60 meters high. The inside of the building is lavishly decorated with marble, stucco ornamentation, gold-leaf, and paintings. The idea was that all the important people who visited the Habsburgs would be impressed by not only the collections they had, but by the building itself. And boy did they succeed! The marble is breathtaking! The museum is large and we cruised through Egyptian sarcophagi,burial urns,paintings and figures, Greek and roman sculpture (with an interesting side exhibit on photocromology, the science of discovering that all those white statues used to be painted colours-who knew!), a traveling coin exhibit with coins from 320-present, and Dutch and Flemish paintings including Peter Paul Rubins, our old friend from Antwerp, and Rembrandt. ho hum! The best section was the Habsburg treasures. They dated from the 1500's until 1918, when the family lost their reign. We were stunned as room after room revealed jewelry and statues, bowls and figures, automatons and joke vases, everything encrusted with gold and jewels, precious gems, mother of pearl,carved from ivory, I mean, how can you even describe it in a blog? One cool thing was in the rooms with the automatons, they had tablets on benches along the sides of the room, and you good view small,gorgeous movies made of the automatons actually running! One of our favs was a galleon with chained prisoners at the oars, and they would row as the boat traveled down the length of the table, with crew men moving, sails billowing,etc. all done by the intricate clockworks housed inside. Another cool one was a tower/pagoda, with figures that danced and spun, and right at the end, a door pooped open and a little man popped out, facing backwards, and dropped his trousers! Couldn't you just hear the laughter of the Emperor and his bawdy pals at this one!
We closed the place down at 6pm.and headed to Vapiano, and little bistro across from our hotel. They give each diner a card and then you go to whichever counter you'd like and order up pasta,salads,pizzas baked to order,bar drinks(of course,we're in Europe!) coffees and desserts. Then you just lounge around as long as you want! Danny and I played Phase 10 and chilled like locals!

Egyptian area

very rare Egyptian artifact-can't remember when it's from!

Danny liked the bling!

main entrance staircase

hard to see, but Mary is holding a sleeping one year old Jesus, loving mother, so beautiful!

this is an ore nugget, that was then carved and added onto with scenes of mining and religion-together

how are these objects for demonstrating your wealth?!

this is about 4 inches long, it was for holding smelling salts!

mathematical instruments and clocks were big collections and fascinated the people at that time

, all gold of course

an automaton

inside of the dome

art galleries that we literally shot through there was so much....

in the Imperial palace complex, having fun!

sun and clouds at 6:30pm

living like a local :)