Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Graz Update: July 1st

Hi there,

We haven't been very action-packed here lately, but there are a some new pictures available in the Photobucket. Holly went to Vienna this week for a few days, and did more touristing. The two biggest things visited were the museum of natural history and the museum of art history. These two museums are in twin buildings in the middle of town, and each one took about 4 hours to visit, even with skipping a lot of stuff, and with major exhibits closed for renovation. Truly enormous, well curated collections! The new pictures mostly relate to that, probably half the pictures are from the natural history museum. Many other buildings that she wanted to visit were closed for renovation, and there was a distinctly weird tendency to put safety netting around the outside of the building, that was printed with a picture of the building. (Although in one case, they did that on the opera house, and it's not even under construction--just part of the facade is obscured by a billboard, with a picture of the part of the facade that's blocked off. Very strange.)

Greg worked this week, and got a slight cold; we didn't make any photographs of that.

Probably the most exciting thing to happen in the last couple of weeks was making travel arrangements to go to Munich for Oktoberfest for a few days toward the end of September. That will be a first for both of us, and we're really looking forward to it. Here are a few pictures from Vienna:

Karlskirche, a baroque cathedral, with some modern art in the foreground.



Mohneiskugel, poppy ice cream with plum conserve + plum liquor inside, rolled in poppy seeds. With unsweetened whipped cream, and a prune on the side.... Yes, the table IS stylishly edged with duct tape.

Found another Hundertwasser-designed building, totally by accident. In fact, by walking about a half mile the wrong direction for another destination. This is an ENORMOUS building, about the size of a large apartment complex. Yes, those are trees growing on the outside of it. This is about half the building, the other half was less exciting, and also harder to photograph. Anyway, the blobs of bright colors are tile mosaics. This is the customer service center and main offices for a branch of the power company. Many more pictures of that in Photobucket.



Does this give a sense of how far out from the center of town my hotel was? Well, that was 5 stops BEFORE the end of the tram I took to get there, and I still had to keep walking after that. But it was really peaceful. :)
Guess that's all for this time. Love to hear from you. Send pictures of some oddities in your neighborhood!
-Holly & Greg

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