What There's Time For

Things We Will Miss: The Playgrounds

I've been reluctant to say it out loud, but now that we've done the pre-departure consultation with the moving company, here it is:

We're leaving Vienna.

Overall we're very happy to be heading back closer to friends and family (in time for several exciting weddings!) and saying goodbye to a few annoyances of living here, but we have had a wonderful time and you're going to have to put up with some anticipatory nostalgia over the next few weeks.

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When we were getting ready to move to Vienna two years ago, lots of people warned us that Austria is not child-friendly.  Then we arrived and found a gem of a playground hidden around every corner, each one with its own quirky creative touches, but nearly all of them with sand boxes, really BIG sandboxes, and water pumps.

Playgrounds at home haven't been this much messy fun in 50 years.  And I say messy fun is child-friendly.

This is a nice place because it's good.

Just a short drive out of town, vineyards blanket the steep rolling slopes that look back on Vienna.  The spring wind barrels out of the higher mountains and ricochets back up from the river, making a short walk from the car a grand adventure...

...billowing lounge chairs into tent hideaways (This is a nice place because it's good.  - Mr. Pants)...

...and tossing full wine glasses right off the table (solution:  don't let go).

Evidence that I drink but rarely (and little):

1.  After one weiss Wein gespritzt, my answer to Shmoogie's, "Wherz dis?" was, "Where's this?  This is Heaven!"

2.  Shmoogie found that so delightful that we spent a good few minutes putting our arms over our heads, squealing, and slapping them down again.  And high-fiving.

3.  When a second glass (actual wine) was nearly through and Mr. Right announced it was time to go home, Mr. Pants wanted to know why and Mr. Right answered, "It's time to take Mommy home," and Mr. Pants protested pleadingly, since Mommy was currently being more fun than she had been in a while, "Let's not take Mommy home yet!"

 

Surprised by Fun

Today is a liminal day.  Our last guests left (sniff!) early this morning and no one slept well.  Friday is a bizarre day to start back into a regular routine, so when the clock just kept ticking right on past school start time, I took Mr. Pants along on my planned morning outing - a photo exhibit at the Wien Museum with a friend.

In a strange parallel to yesterday (we went for the Michelangelo exhibit at the Albertina, which was crowded and hard to appreciate, and decided to speed through Picasso afterwards, which I think we all preferred, plus we learned shocking facts like, The Spanish Civil War was in the 1930's!  Picasso lived into the 1970's!  Picasso painted the iconic peace dove!  He lived in occupied Paris throughout WWII!  Lots and lots of his paintings (not just Guernica!) are political/anti-war!  Who knew?  Not us.)... hmm... let's start that again...

In a strange parallel to yesterday, the "Window Shopping" exhibit we went to see was a little dull.  The permanent collection of Middle Ages statues, altar pieces, and stained glass from Stephansdom, though?  That was amazing.  I had naively assumed that all that stuff was either still in Stephansdom (it's not exactly an empty-looking cathedral) or had been lost forever.

And, much more importantly in the kids' opinion, there is a children's play area set up for the winter months based on one of the current special exhibits.  This year it's "Alphabet Soup," interpreting the work of Ernst Jandl (who I've never heard of, but I read was famous for his "sound poems" and "blurred the boundaries between poetry, performance, music, and visual art").  The poem on the poster is titled the mother and the child and it says roughly, i/want/to play//play/my child, except the vowels are all warped in a fun way.

Shmoogie spent most of her time climbing from one hole in a giant tipped-over letter B to the other, playing peekaboo with me every once in a while.  Mr. Pants tried everything - collecting all the letter A's, stacking alphabet cubes into adult-height-help-required/impressive-when-knocked-over towers, using the giant foam letters as slides and jungle gyms, and building forts from a bounty of huge magnetically self-attaching foam triangles.  And then, just when we thought the fun was all over, he found a Lego table in the gift shop (printed with a minimalist map of Vienna, no less - see the river and canal?).