A little frugality never hurt anyone

I just realized that I've been rather negligent on the picture aspect of this blog. Also, nothing extraordinarily out of the ordinary happened today, so let's fill up some space with my face! Or how about this guy's!














Weird, huh? Appartenly, this artist made over 50 busts of old guys making strange faces. Weird hobby.

A disconcerting new phase of Raynaud's that was hitherto unknown to me. I call it "dust feet." It manifests itself only after trecking up many many switchbacks in the hot sun to disgustingly huge mansions gardens. It's very specific. No wonder I hadn't encountered it until now. Speaking of masions....

The top one is Belevedere, home of Prince Eugene (pronounced u-gin by the delightful woman on the audio tour stick/phone-thingy) who got rich from fighting wars. He had a big ol' house built (not one of the pictures), then decided it just didn't have enough cherubs and gold leaf, so he built another one! A bigger one! The middle picture is a view of the Habsburg's summer home. It's called Schonbrunn. (The "o" has some of those dots on top of it, but I can't seem to find that key on my keyboard) And that bottom picture is where I'm standing to take the middle picture...follow? Anyway, it was enormous. All of it. Also, notice that GIANT (am I getting across the enormity of this stuff??) fountain in the bottom picture? Neptune's Fountain. Filled with mermen riding merhorses. Check it out...

It turns out I'm a serious wiz at reading German maps. I know! Hard to believe, condsidering I was in High School before I could find the grocery store on my own. Here's proof--remember that crazy architectual wonder we couldn't find yesterday? Well, thanks to my uncanny ability to read words like "Unt. Viadukt," Radetzkypl," and "Damfsch str" all crossing on top of each other in 2 point font, we found it! And it was definately worth it. We couldn't take many pictures of what we found inside, but here's the outside.

This guy was a serious environmentalis who probably spent some considerable time "puffing the magic dragon" if you know what I mean. But he created some pretty sweet stuff. Clearly. Look what he did with just some colored tiles and the front of a building.

Ok, so my face didn't actually make an appearance in this post. Try to reign in the rampant disappointment. Instead, check out this awesome graffitti. Something tells me the young hooligans of Austria have a brighter outlook on life than many of those in America.

By the way, we're off to Salzburg and Hallstatt tomorrow morning until Friday night and I won't be bringing my computer along. Then Saturday morning I officially start my Italy adventure, so I don't know when exactly I will be able to post next. Until then, auf wiedersehen!