mini-golf in Vienna (plus some other stuff)

[lauradi7dw]

We had gone to the Prater amusement park to ride the famous ferris wheel
http://www.tourist-net.co.at/w_pr_3e.htm
and noticed the mini-golf course while looking down. Of course we had to try it out. It turned out to be a fairly difficult course, because it was only lit by a few streetlights and the concrete putting areas weren't exactly flat. It wasn't the worst mini-golf course we have ever visited - that would be the one in the basement of the Raleigh, a now-defunct Catskills hotel - but there were some problems. Also the only time we've ever played mini-golf in which one hole had a large expanse of actual grass growing in the middle.
Other stuff happened. I got to meet a lot of economists who had just been names to me before, and visited with some of Arthur's friends I'd already met. Saw a *lot* of Baroque ceilings (and walls, etc). I stopped looking up after a while (although we also saw a wonderful ceiling in the chapel at a monastery in the Vienna woods, where it was clear where the construction fashion had switched over from Romanesque to Gothic).

Walked along the Danube and dipped our fingers in.

Walked a lot in general. Had a petit-fors sized piece of Sacher torte from the place that made it famous (at the Sachar Hotel). We didn't go to any of the Mozart concerts setup specially for his 250th year, but I did read a bunch of the little things with trivia set up about him, we heard a street performer play classical music on a piano that I suppose she had pushed down the cobblestone pedestrian area, and saw a bit of "La Traviata" projected on a huge screen in front of the city hall. They have musical movies there every night of the summer, and there is essentially a food court (and beer, and wine) set up so that you could have dinner and a show. Really nice. Despite Florence's warnings, we had no trouble finding vegetarian food. In addition to the time I spent with Arthur, I went to at least half a dozen museums by myself. A drop in the bucket - there are 90 or more in the Vienna area. I also didn't make it out nearly to the border of Slovakia to see the Ancient Roman theme park, but I considered it.
http://www.carnuntum.co.at/index_set_en.html
My favorite museum was the Natural History one.
http://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/d/engvorschau.html
I spent two hours in the stone age through iron age area, and hardly looked at any of the other stuff. It was especially cool to see the “Venus von Willendorf”
http://www.aeiou.at/aeiou.encyclop.v/v136200.htm;internal&action=_setlanguage.action?LANGUAGE=en
and some other objects from long ago Europeans.
I decided that maybe I should start wearing bead necklaces, a habit that's been around for tens of thousands of years, but that's true about tatooing and scarification as well, and I'm not going to take that up.
Virgin let me have Chapstick (specifically) on the way to London, but it was taken away before the flight to Vienna, and I had to do without on the other flights.