What the Weekends Are All About

So much love between these two...

I do actually have some posts in the works that are taking considerable effort to edit from their original erratic stream-of-thought from, so I thought I'd break in to update you with the age-old favorite: what we’ve been up to.

 Let’s start with the obvious:  We’re bumming around Vienna.  Audrey, Bailey and I have a fairly regular routine during the week involving playgrounds, ten-minute trips to the grocery store (I highly recommend this), watching Ice Age 3, dumping every toy in the house on the floor, stubbornly attempting (for the umpteenth time) to do homeschooling curriculum and inevitably ending all this in the joyous celebration of Papa walking through the door.  

Audrey and Bartube the goat.

On weekends we shake up our routine a bit—Papa is around and that makes everything a little better.  Last weekend was a three day weekend for the IAEA and we took advantage of some gorgeous weather, spending time at the girls’ favorite splash park and discovering a brand new-to-us enormous park in the tenth district where the girls practiced their football (that’s soccer, Yanks) skills and made friends with some goats (this is seriously Bailey’s favorite animal outside pigs at the moment).  

Yes, feel free to salivate; it was as awesome as it looks.

Our Monday together was a rare one:  Usually we’re subject to the sparse weekend hours of Viennese retail establishments, so it was a total novelty for John to come with us to Café Diglas, where he announced he was beginning to understand my obsession with Vienna’s coffee houses.  Cake with a towering mound of meringue served in a pool of warm cream will do that to a person.   Yet another novelty for John on our little holiday was being able to take his girls to the toy store; he and Audrey play “Castle” so often, they were in search of a new character to introduce to their rag-tag bunch of figurines.  We managed to come away with a fantastic horse-riding fairy for Audrey and a *surprise!* goat figurine for Bailey, but the real gem of the day was a toy bow and arrow we found for Audrey.  

Olympic Archers have to start somewhere

We are not actually big into bringing more toys into the house or introducing weapons to our children for that matter, but since we saw the movie Brave in the theater one rainy weekend, my Audrey girl has been BIG into Merida (the female lead).  And given she’s the only female Disney character easily called to mind who is both independently strong-willed and has absolutely no love interest involved in her story, we’ve encouraged Audrey in her Brave enthusiasm.  Merida happens to be a stellar archer, and for several months now Audrey has been shooting fake pulled-out-of-thin-air arrows at me any time she starts getting frustrated.  So, you can understand the excitement at getting her hands on a real cheap plastic weapon. We took our littler archer to the park for her first lesson and she’s actually getting really good.  Now, if we could just keep Bailey from breaking all the flimsy plastic arrows, we’d be golden.  

View from the Tiergarten to Vienna

This weekend has been a lot cooler and damp, but we headed out in the elements anyway this Saturday to the Lainzer Tiergarten: a vast wooded area to the Southwest of Vienna, which used to serve as royal hunting grounds.  Over 6,000 acres were originally fenced off in 1561 by Ferdinand I for his personal use, but it has been open to the public since 1919. The walk from the train station to the park entrance was a surprise; Vienna’s 13^th district, Hietzing, was absolutely charming.  I’ll admit to some shock upon seeing homes in the ‘city’ complete with massive back yards—not manicured gardens, but grass!  Grass that employees of the city aren’t responsible for maintaining!  ...not to mention shrubs and vines left unchecked, growing in all their leggy, asymmetrical glory. What a pleasant surprise!   

Boars!!

But not nearly as pleasant a surprise as realizing the official party waiting to greet us at the entrance to the forest was a trio of honest-to-God wild boars.  They were cute, but we left them alone...even though Bailey would’ve joined their little herd and abandoned us if we would have let her. We spent a really pleasant day reconnecting with nature.  I love this city, but it’s almost a form of grounding for me to get out of the concrete jungle to commune with my trees.  The girls really enjoyed romping about in the forest and actually did some impressive hiking up hills and such.  Needless to say, the Lanzier Tiergarten has now scored a place in the regular rotation of places we frequent. 

This kid loved the forest. She didn't want to leave.

Outside the Art History Museum

On Sunday, in a nod to the stormy weather, we completely turned the tables and hit up a museum we hadn’t yet graced with our presence:  The Art History Museum.  This one seems like a total no-brainer— a museum that should have been checked off within weeks of our arrival, but it is HUGE.  I cannot emphasize enough the enormity of the place.  And with two kids who aren’t particularly tolerant of art *cough* Bailey *cough*, we were hesitant to waste the Euros on something we might have to abandon half an hour in.  Enter: the glorious and magnificent Year Pass.  I don’t know why we didn’t think of this sooner: it not only allows us access to the museum whenever we want, but it also is valid for free admission to several other museums in Vienna.  High fives all around!  So, we didn’t have to feel bad about dragging our kids around the Ancient Egyptian/Greek/Roman wing then scooting promptly along to grab some lunch.  Some other cold, dreary weekend we will bore the kids again with this thing called ‘culture’.  It’s one of the many perks of living in Vienna; taking our time to savor the good stuff.  And that’s really what weekends are all about.