Lieblings

Julia's newest favorite word: liebling. It means "darling" or "favorite" in German. And, as everyone I know knows well, I love to use love-names for my friends: dearest, precious, honey, sweetheart, darling, etc. Now, I have a German one for my collection!

This post will have some of my favorite things from this week in Vienna and various other odds and ends.

• These chairs are in the square outside Stephansdom. This would be more hilarious if I wasn't so used to feeling this way on normal chairs sometimes. =P

Mozart was there too.

• When the trains in the U-Bahn stations are coming, the wind comes rushing down the tunnel ahead of them and I always expect THIS to happen. Someday, it will. And I will get into Narnia.
• Floors start on level zero.

• Sometimes you just look up, and there are cannonballs from the barbarian sieges hanging on the walls of the houses.

• People wear color-coordinated scarves and hats (and sometimes mittens too). These two wonderful ladies I saw on the U-Bahn were complete strangers but they matched.

• On one of our walking tours, I found the Sword-in-the-Sidewalk. (I kindly left it there for future generations).

• I love the fleamarket. I loved accidently discovering that if you start walking away from a stand, prices immediately drop by 50% and then 70%. And I love these new hats we bought for next-to-nothing.

(And I loved this sweet little dagger but it would have cost me

my whole food budget for Vienna, so I passed.).

• One night, Michelle and I explored our street, Mariahilferstrasse (which I discovered is translated literally “Mary Help Street”) and took pictures with the store window models.

On the way upstairs, we took pictures in the round windows of the staircase.

• Mozart Croissants. What will they think of next?

Fun fact: croissants came to be after the Turks were driven out of Vienna. The bakeries of the city made bread shaped like the Turkish crescent. And, when you are next in Vienna, try the chocolate-vanilla-filled croissants. They. Are. Divine.

• On this bridge above the Danube, there were legwarmers on the railings. And believe me, they needed it.

It was SO incredibly frigid that day but we took my favorite picture of me and Michelle so far. We had been walking around for three hours in what Dr. Hinkley described as “liquid ice being blasted into your face with a firehose.” This is the result.

P.S. And that same afternoon, we got home and couldn’t unlock the door. Michelle was devastated as you can see.