Schonnbrun & Schnitzel

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At Ulli’s suggestion I went to Schonbrun Palace the next day. It was pretty impressive, the only bad thing was that they were setting up the Christmas market so my photos have these wooden huts but no market in them. I did the tour of the apartments, which very rather nice. And the old Franz Joseph seemed like a pretty good bloke too - anyone could get an appointment to see him for any reason, you applied and got your date and time and turned out and made your case. Because he saw up to 100 people per morning each appointment was only several minutes long, but could you imagine John Howard doing that? And Franz was emperor to over 35 million people. No photos of course and too many people working there to get away with sneaky indoor shots. All for the sake of selling some more touristy books.

After the royal rooms tour I wandered outside around the grounds. Behind the palace itself there is a long straight flat area leading to a statue and fountain. And of course there was the usual people doing stupid poses in front of it lol. Some Canadians do exact poses of the people in the statues, looked pretty funny. Wandered up the zig zag path to the top of the hill and the Gloriette, which gave a nice view back down the hill to the palace. The sun was coming and going from behind the clouds and managed to get some nice pics then kept wandering around and eventually back to the train station and back to Ulli’s place.

We went to a traditional style Austrian restaurant for lunch, where I had a traditional Weiner schnitzel and potatoes, then a slightly different schnitzel with potato salad. Very tasty though Ulli seemed to have some trouble believing I could eat that much… she ain’t seen anything :D. Ulli went home to study and I went back into the centre of town until after dark, but I was too late to get into anywhere.

It was now that I realized why people looked different over here and it wasn’t just the lack of wrinkles from sun damage - there isn’t the ‘fat attack’ we are having in Australia. I swear they should make t-shirts saying “there are no fat chicks in Austria”, similar to the “there are no kangaroos in Austria” shirts.

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