Habsburg Palaces

On Monday the 23rd, Ilonka and I went to the OBB ticket office with Jan to purchase all our trip tickets for Hungary and Poland. It was really confusing and really expensive, so I'm glad Jan was there to do it for us. All we had to do was provide information on when people wanted to get to the cities and leave the cities. After purchasing the tickets I went into Plenum to work on some data analyses. It was an uneventful day.

On Tuesday I finally did some laundry! It was only 4 Euros to do here at the hostel, which is a really reasonable price, considering the laundromat costs about 10 Euros. I also went to a beauty salon to get my lip (read: mustache) waxed, which was a fairly pleasant experience. I expected it to be difficult because of my experiences with waiters at restaurants being grouchy, but the girl was very pleasant. She even shook my hand before I left. I've noticed that service providers seem to want to shake your hand, which is interesting to me. While I was waiting for my appointment, I went out to Mariahilfer Strasse and got a Krapfen, which was just like a jelly donut, only better because it didn't leave a yucky film in my mouth like donuts in the States sometimes do.

On Tuesday evening I took a quick trip to the Schonbrunn Gardens. The Schonbrunn Palace was one of the Habsbugs summer palaces, and is another gorgeous building with sprawling gardens. I will get back to this place, since I only had a short time before I needed to get back for dinner with the group. We went to a Thai restaurant for dinner. One thing to note is that dogs are allowed in almost all establishments here in Austria, a couple with a leashed dog was being seated as we were enjoying our meal.

Schonbrunn Palace

One of the fountains in the palace courtyard.

The backside of the palace, facing the gardens.

My Thai meal. (I should've had a Mai Tai)

On Wednesday, a bunch of us went to Jan and Jo's Zen Center Opening Ceremony. The Zen Center is a Buddhist meditation center, apparently this is the first one in Vienna. We squeezed about 50 people into an average sized living room, sitting cross-legged on the floor. We did some chants and some meditation, and then we were treated to delicious vegan food that had been prepared by a world-renowned Israeli chef. The final event of the opening was a violin concert, the woman played three pieces of Baroque-style music. I took the program so that I might be able to download the same pieces and learn them. They were really beautiful. After the opening we walked back towards the hostel and stopped for a quick drink on the way. Our server this time was actually very pleasant and nice to us. Perhaps it was because it was the end of his shift and he was excited to go home...

On Thursday the whole group headed to Laxenburg for a seminar with Piotr. Laxenburg is where the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is housed. IIASA is the institute that we are loosely affiliated with, and they are handling our funding for trips around Europe. IIASA is housed in a weekend palace of the Hapsburgs, so it's not your typical 60s/70s style architecture that you see a lot of on University Campuses in the US. It was a more beautiful setting. We had a brief meeting with Piotr to discuss our role playing exercised that will take place in Poland, and then he got us free entry into the park, essentially the royal's weekend playground. Here we walked around the paths, saw some streams and waterfalls, and went into the castle on the island for a snack. To read more about IIASA's fascinating history, see this document: http://www.iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/whatisiiasa/informationkit/BriefHistory.pdf.

IIASA is housed in this old palace of the Habsburgs.

A waterfall at the Hapsburgs weekend/summer palace.

The Ferdinand Castle on an island in the Habsburg's Laxenburg gardens.

Today I'm headed to Ljubljana, Slovenia for the weekend, with Hannah, Ilonka, Don, and Noelle. Should be a great trip, with lots of outdoor time. I'll post about it upon my return!