*Prepare yourself for the longest post in history. Maybe go get a snack before you begin. Although you will probably just spend 2 minutes looking at the pictures anyway.*
All things considered, my birthday was not lame at all.
I got to spend the day with my family and my night with a bunch of drunken SLC yuppies and (much more importantly), Wilco.
And then the next day we flew off to Newark to sleep once again on the floor of Phil’s many-windowed apartment where we are always, always seduced by the Manhattan skyline. (I have to mention, as an aside, that we were picked up at the airport by a car service, which I found terribly fancy but realized later is really just convenient. As we were looking for our black-suited man with his “Bowman” sign, I saw another guy greeting a black-suited man with a “Krause” sign who looked familiar, and so, through the miracle of modern technology, I googled him while we were standing with him at baggage claim and realized he was this man. That, I am sorry to tell you, was our only brush with fame on this trip. I always think/hope that when I go to New York, Ryan Gosling will end up saving me from being hit by a cab. This has not yet happened, but I hold out hope. Though not so much hope that I jump out in front of cabs expecting him to appear.)
The theme of the few days we spent in New York was FOOD. The assistant theme was BOOKSTORES. So you can guess that I was very happy with the whole thing. Our first bookstore was Strand, which was like Book Mecca; our second was the MOMA bookstore, which we went to after viewing an excellent Alighiero Boetti exhibit; and our third was 3 Lives in the West Village, which was a tiny slice of carefully selected Book Heaven—small, but perfect.
The food involved Shake Shack burgers, Alfanoose falafel, bomb pops from a Central Park cart, Magnolia Bakery’s banana pudding (I die) and theater district sushi with Lisa, Tyler, and Haddie (food made especially good because of the company), an early breakfast at Sara Beth’s in Chelsea Market, and probably lots of good snacks here and there that I am forgetting.
And did I mention that David salsa-danced with me on the High Line to the tunes of a crazy Cuban band? So basically I was in heaven. Lower your rent prices, New York, and then I will come for you. Actually, I will probably come for you anyway.
But on to the purpose of this post . . . after a few days of traipsing around Manhattan, we headed back to the airport and made our sweet way to Vienna. I was highly disappointed with myself on this flight. At nearly all times, I am a champion sleeper. I sleep through car crashes, I sleep through car crash scenes in movies, I sleepwalk, I sleep-talk, I have even sleep-kissed (or so I’ve been told). I sleep especially well while being transported; trains are my forté, but I am also good in cars and planes. So I was very chagrined when I found myself unable to sleep on this stupidly long transatlantic flight, especially knowing that my ability to operate on small amounts of sleep is roughly equivalent to that of a 2-year-old child.
But then, after a short little Zurich stop-over in which everyone was very sleepy, we were there, driving from the airport into the alleyways of the city center, terribly lost but also enchanted. Vienna looks just exactly the way Europe is supposed to look. Classic and old and quaint and a million other clichés. So after showers in our über-hip hotel, we took off on a traipse about the neighborhood.
Wet-headed Bowman girls
St. Stephen’s cathedral, a few steps from our hotel
Spot the bum.
Don’t worry, my eyes reappeared after a few days. I like Phil’s face in the background.
Karlsplatz tourism
The innards of St. Stephen’s church.
That night, we rode the metro to the Prater, which really (as it turned out), was only a few blocks from where we were staying. The Prater (officially called the Wiener Prater, one of many moments I giggled at the German language), is a big public park with a sort of amusement park on one end which contains a Madame Tussaud’s (unfortunately), but not, I am happy to report, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It also contains a lot of restaurants serving up giant fried ham hocks, and a lot of carnival-ish rides. We discovered in one of the restaurants there a few things about Austrian food, namely, a) it is served in gigantic proportions, b) it is mostly fried, c) it makes very good/interesting use of horseradish, and d) it is not very good. We ate a lot of it anyway. Then we rode on some swings that took us a mile up in the air, almost. I have officially turned into a lame adult because I thought it was terrifying and all I could think about for most of the time we were riding was how we were probably going to plunge to our deaths at any moment.
We did not plunge to our deaths. Instead we saw the whole of the city spread out around us and below us and it was very beautiful, which I didn’t appreciate until my heart rate slowed back down a few days later.
In the Prater; the stupid wild mouse ride. Worst ride ever.
I think he’s awfully cute.
Austrian food; that apfel juice was pretty awesome. The ham hock reminded me of those microwavable pork rinds that sometimes make me gag when I see them in the check-out line at the grocery store. I’m always confused by that; is that really something that tempts people while they’re checking out their groceries, like candy and gum?
The ticket promises fun.
You can’t tell, but it keeps going up probably a mile beyond what the picture shows.
Apparently, Austrians are aware of Alaska. Probably in the same way John McCain is aware of the internet.
You can tell pretty clearly which pictures in this post were taken with a Nikon D700 and which were taken with an iPhone.
In the subway, you could pay 20c to “pissoir” while listening to opera tunes. I’m really sad I didn’t try this. I think it might have been life-changing, like eating an orange in the shower after camping.
Day 2 of Vienna was largely spent sweating. We kept being told that it was the hottest day in history, which I don’t exactly buy, unless Vienna has never broken 100 F. It’s funny how people always want to believe it’s the hottest/coldest/whatever-est day in history so they can feel like survivors, but also justify quite a bit of complaining. We didn’t complain, because we’re survivors, but we did sweat. A lot. So excuse us if you can see wet pits in any of these photos.
The morning of June 30, the alleged hottest day that has ever been, found us at Schonnbrunn palace, where we spent most of our time following Japanese tour groups from room to room, listening to our audio-guides and trying without success to figure out the Hapsburg lineage. Hard as I tried, the only Hapsburg I can still remember is Gerhardt, and he is not even real. My favorite parts of the palace were the box-shaped trees in the gardens and the Chinese rooms with black enamel in-lays. If I were royal, I would probably just have a lot of Gibsons. Maybe Gibsons with black enamel in-lays.
Just keeping it real at the palace.
It reminded us so much of home because of the palace’s resemblance to Wymount.
See my new sunglasses? Husband got them for me for my birthday :).
The backyard.
Box trees
One of these things is not like the others.
After we took the awkwardly posed shot above, we headed to the Leopold Museum in the Museums Quartier, where we saw lots of Klimt, Egon Schiele (I loved his landscapes), 5,000 or so woodcuts of Trieste, and then I fell asleep in a chair. But I woke back up, and because my husband is a freak about museums, and because I am a loving wife, I continued on the tour of the MQ while the others (I believe), went back to the hotel and took naps. David, Katie and I ended up at a bizarre fashion exhibit in the Mumoc, where one of the pieces of art was a pair of jeans with the crotch cut out, entitled, to our delight, “Genitalpanik”. Then we got gelato and had a discussion about whether art is still art if it has no audience. Because we’re deep.
The best part of Vienna, to me, was the wandering. That day we ended up walking a lot and stumbling on dozens of gorgeous parks and buildings, including the Hofburg palace. Once we made it home, we all met up at the hotel restaurant where it was proved that Austrian food can actually be delicious when it is not pork rinds. After dinner, we embarked on a journey to get a chocolate torte from the Imperial Hotel, where Phil and Gloria stayed once and fell in love (with the torte). I think I gained a couple of pounds just looking at that torte.
Wanders.
Hofburg palace
On day 3, we inexplicably decided that those Hop-On, Hop-Off bus tours are full of wisdom about the city that we needed to gain, so we hopped on (actually, we pretty much elbowed our way on since there were about a million people waiting for each bus) and listened to the wisdom in the form of an audio-guide that turned out to have a very sleep-inducing voice. So while I did see lots of pretty buildings through groggy eyes, I did not catch much of anything my guide was saying. We hopped off at a park, got some ice cream, lay on the grass, took pictures with a sculpture, and then, while Phil and Gloria headed back to the hotel via train, I led the Bowman children on a long wander. Because they don’t have sufficient experience with my wonderfully accurate, innate sense of direction, they all grew increasingly nervous (I think) as we continued to wander. But we did eventually find our way back, and we even got to hear the horses of the Spanish Riding School (though we went at the wrong time of the year to actually see them perform). I did not detect an accent in any of their whinnies.
That day was church, and since the city has an English ward, we understood everything that was said and we were so glad because it was a wonderful testimony meeting and also like an oven in the chapel, which might have been harder to sweat through if the meeting had been in German. Our own little Katydid bore her testimony and then we all wept, but no one noticed because the tears just mingled with the beads of sweat that were already covering our faces.
The end of this Viennese tale involves us discovering again that Austrian food can be very tasty, but will definitely give you a heart attack. And with that knowledge in our pockets, we got up the next morning and boarded the train to Salzburg.
pretty to think so 
