simmiecakes

Auf Wiedersehen, Munich

Just had to bust into my suitcase to get my computer after I lost the keys to the very heavy-duty lock. And by very heavy-duty, I mean I busted the lock using my hairbrush.

Also, my bad, the Winter Olympics in 1972 were in Japan, not Munich, so I have no idea why there’s a hockey rink at the Olympic complex now. Maybe they got confused?

Anyways…today was a good day. It was only moderately freezing for most of the day and I didn’t get up excessively late so I was able to actually see some stuff today. I started by heading out to Nymphenburg Palace which was the summer residence of the Bavarian royalty.

It’s actually a huge area with like 30 buildings and sweeping gardens, but since it’s winter and cold, not everything is open, and the gardens are less than stunning. The main part of the museum is the living quarters and you had the opportunity to get an audio guide. And you can bet I capitalized on that opportunity. I’m glad I did, because the audio guide was great! I feel like the experience without the audio guide would have been pretty boring as there wasn’t much to read.

King Ludwig II lived at this palace and this dude a had thing for the ladies. He had an entire room he called “The Hall of Beauties” which has walls filled with portraits of girls he thought were beautiful. Including his mistress. How scandalous! However, he didn’t discriminate against the ladies based on their class; he had ladies who were royalty and he had ladies who were peasants. As long as they were beautiful they could go on the wall.

After exhausting every single entry of the audio guide, I headed over to Marstallmuseum which houses the carriage collection of Ludwig II. Dude, that guy has some wheels. This trip has given me so many options for when I decide to upgrade the Corolla.

Everything in this museum was in German so I didn’t understand lots of it. Including this case. What are these?!

If anyone knows what 14 nose shaped things are used for, let me know.

The gardens behind the palace are gigantic. And amazing. And if it were summer, I would guess they would be breathtaking. I walked around for a while, exploring the grounds and thinking if I was more on top of things, it would have been nice to go run there. You know, before I ate the 3 pretzels, cake, and large meal of meat and potatoes that was inevitably in my future.

The last stop on my Nymphenburg Palace tour was this little building called Amelienburg. Amelienburg was just a little hunting lodge built by Charles II for his wife, Maria Amelia. Maria Amelia liked to get out in nature and shoot her some animals, so this place was perfect for her when she was on the hunt.

This room even has little rooms for the dogs. Or for giant mice.

The main room has mirrored walls all around. I’m not sure what the point of it was…maybe to make the room look bigger? It definitely gives it a rather light and airy feel.

Also makes it convenient to take pictures of yourself. Yes, in case you missed it, it’s cold in Munich right now. Oh and hey! Those are my new mittens! Aren’t they awesome?

After my adventure at Nymphenburg Palace, I headed back into town. I decided to climb St. Peter’s Church to get a nice view of the city. It is pretty nice, isn’t it? I have no idea how many stairs it was up the tower, but I think my previously described laziness and propensity to eat everything I see while on vacation was taking its toll. By the time I reached the top, I was gasping for air and my legs were on fire. But what a view!

My final museum stop of the trip was…can you guess? The Jewish Museum in Munich! I have amassed quite a collection of Jewish Museum visits all over the world and this one…it wasn’t too bad. It was a small museum, but the main exhibit was interesting, relevant, and presented in a pleasing manner. It definitely ranks above the Vienna one, but below the Berlin (which I think is number 1) and Prague (which is also up there). I think the only country where I haven’t been to a Jewish museum is Korea…and I’m pretty sure they don’t have one there. I’m pretty sure they don’t have Jews there.

The rest of my day was spent buying gifts and eating the aforementioned cake (vanilla cake with an apple-poppy seed strusel topping. Unexpected, but tasty.), pretzels, and large plate of meat and potatoes.

I really wanted to eat dessert, but by the time I was finished I couldn’t stuff another forkful in. Now I’m back at the hotel trying to figure out how I’m going to get all of this stuff back to America in one piece. I think I decided this was the buy-all-the-breakables-you-can trip, so there’s going to be a lot of wrapping stuff in clothes going on.

I’ve got an early train to catch tomorrow mornings (woo 5:30 AM!) before I hop (I wonder why they use the term “hop” to mean to get on a plane? I don’t think anyone ever hops onto a plane. In fact, I think we most likely trudge begrudgingly to our tiny seats) on a plane back to DC.

Gute Nacht!

Ultimate Driving Machine?

Ok, I’m on the world’s slowest internet connection, so we’ll see how this goes.

I’m in Munich! I slept in kind of late today which wasn’t the greatest idea. Turns out since it’s the off season, pretty much everything closes early here. So with a late start, there was a lot to cram in today.

The first thing I did was head up the Olympic Park and the BMW factory. I took the U-bahn up there and apparently managed to figure out how to get the correct ticket because when the guy came around to check it, he didn’t kick me off the train.

The Munich BMW location is basically made up of three buildings: BMW Welt, the BMW Museum, and the factory. I walked into the BMW Welt building just to see what was up and figured I’d take a tour or something. I really wanted to take a factory tour but when I checked online it said all the tours were sold out. Ha! Liars! When I walked up to the guy to ask him what was up, he told me that an English tour of the factory was starting in about 15 minutes. Score! (The picture up there is the factory.)

The BMW factory tour was AWESOME. I totally engin-nerded out. They started with the raw material, showed us how the pressed out the sheet metal parts, assembled, and welded them together. Then the welded assemblies go through this ridiculous painting process before being sorted for the rest of the assembly. It only takes 20 hours to go from the main bodies to a full car so there’s a lot of logistics into making sure there aren’t any problems.

Also, we Americans have all sorts of special requirements for our cars that other countries don’t have, including metal fuel tubes (how the gas gets from the gas station into the tank) and reflectors on our lights. It was pretty interesting. Also, when we order a BMW, we don’t mess around. Apparently the majority of BMWs made at this factory are fully pimped out with leather, sunroof, and GPS for the American cars.

Anyways, I’ve never wanted a BMW, but after going through this tour I’m all set to go and custom design my next car so I can go through the factory tour again and pick it up here in Munich. Anyone have $40,000 they want to give me? I’ll even take the one in the picture above. It’s so cute!

After the tour I played around in the BMW Welt. It’s basically this ridiculous showroom for all their cars with interactive exhibits on the technology. They focused a lot on hybrid technology and had some pretty interesting activities to teach you about it. After that I headed over to the BMW Museum (above) which is basically the history of BMW. Boy, that is a sleek museum. The way the museum is set up is super modern and definitely reflects the BMW image. Many of the exhibits have projection computers that allow you tap on a flat table and bring up new screens and other exhibits have proximity sensors that start talking if you are standing in the right place. It was all just so cool.

I spent sort of an exorbitant amount of time there so I was scrambling later on to fit stuff in. I walked around the Olympic Park a little, but it’s not all that exciting. Most of the arenas are still used today. Since the Olympics in Munich were in 1972 before they separated the Winter and Summer Games, the Olympic Park has ice skating rinks, swimming pools, soccer arenas, and other sports fields.

As it was getting late I headed downtown to Marianplatz which is the center of town. I popped up from the U-bahn just in time to see the glockenspiel play at the top of the hour. Just like in Prague, the crowds gather to see the show, but this time it was kind of worth the non-existent money. The clock begins to chime at the top of the hour and the display doesn’t finish until almost 10 past the hour. Characters parade, guys dance, and two horses joust with a definitely victor.

I then proceeded to wander around the center of Munich basically just getting lost. I did manage to stumble upon the Viktualienmarkt, which is basically a big outdoor market where you can get fresh meat, vegetables, and flowers. Makes me wish I had a stove. But I did get to eat a pretzel.

It was getting pretty late so I decided to get some dinner.  When in Munich, it seems as though you have to go to the Haufbräuhaus. The Haufbräuhaus is huge hall with many many tables where you can get giant mugs of beer and traditional German food. Dinner is probably the only time when I’m traveling alone that I get really lonely. Especially in a beer hall with groups of raucous people talking and enjoying themselves. I got quite a few looks from the Germans at the table next to me who probably thought I was crazy sitting there by myself not drinking beer (I totally got teased for drinking soda) and eating a leg of meat as big as my head.

Since everything closes early (I got kicked out of a coffee shop at 9:30), I’m thinking about an early to bed so I can at least be efficient with my time tomorrow. I’m now sitting here eating this donut thing and drinking Fanta. I’m working on the 18 hour eating diet. Soon it’s time for bed! Night!

Country Hopping

I’ve been typing that previous post in Word and it was nearing two pages in length, so I decided to break up the post into two separate ones so…I have no good reason why.

Anyways…I slept in late this morning. When I woke up, my window was open, cool air was streaming into my room, and a truck was idling below my window. I felt a lot better though, so I’m glad I got a little extra shuteye. Also, it snowed last night in Vienna. Just a light blanket, but I thought I was done with that stuff.

I got up, packed my stuff, ate breakfast, and headed out for one last day in Vienna. I maintain my stance from before that Vienna is…alright. I’m not in love with the city, and after two trips, I’m in no rush to return.

I started off by going to the Hofburg Palace.  I think this is probably my favorite sight of the trip. It’s where the Hapburgs stayed during the winter months and focused mainly on Franz Joseph I and his eccentric wife, Sisi. Also, there was an audioguide, so I knew I was going to be hooked.

It started off with a tour of the Imperial Silver Collection, which is…a collection of plates. I think it was like 7 rooms of different sets of pans, plates, centerpieces, and more glasses, forks, bowls, and meat presses than you could shake a stick at.

Even though it was a bunch of table settings, I found it to be pretty interesting. Did you know for a long time, they only ate off of gold or silver plates? Never porcelain because it wasn’t fancy enough. Then porcelain started working its way into the dessert course before the 1800s when they decided that it was fancy enough for entire meals.(Also, they were sort of running out of money and started melting down their plates to make coins.)

Oh yeah, this napkin. See how it’s all folded? I mean, it’s no towel shaped like a dog, but apparently that design is like, super exclusive. It’s only folded like that on special occasions and only two people in the whole wide world have been taught how to make that napkin masterpiece. The directions on how to do it are passed down only by word of mouth. Imagine if you knew how to fold that napkin AND the KFC recipe? You’d be set for life.

After the Imperial Silver Collection was a little museum dedicated to Franz Joseph’s wife, Sisi. Her real name was Elizabeth and she was actually kind of intriguing. She married Franz Joseph at the age of 15 and was totally not down with being the Empress of the Austrian Empire. At first she fulfilled her duties, but as time went on, she sort of slipped out of sight (and Austria). She spent a lot of time traveling, writing poetry, and making sure she stayed beautiful. As she got older she got super reclusive and depressed until she was assassinated.

What’s weird is the Austrians have totally adopted her as this great figure in their history. Except she didn’t really do anything when she was alive. It wasn’t until after her death that the media sensationalized her life and introduced intrigue into who she was. It totally worked though, since thousands of tourists clamor to find out everything about her (including myself).

The last part of the museum was the Royal Apartments, which led you through the living quarters of the Hofburg Palace. It was a lot like the Schoenbrunn tour and I found it equally intriguing. It’s also strange to think, just 100 years ago, people lived there. Now people traipse through there marveling at the luxury and excess these people lived in. In 100 years are people going to traipse through my house oogling my stand mixer and 24” TV?

The best part of this tour was seeing Franz Joseph’s study, in which he surrounded himself with pictures of his wife and his children. He was completely devoted to his crazy wife and the romantic in me totally digs that.

His crazy wife was also sort of an exercise fanatic. She wanted to stay slim so I guess she had a very comprehensive exercise routine to keep her figure. She was like 5’8”, weighed 99 lbs, and had a 20” waist. Yeah, that’s tiny. She had a bunch of exercise stuff in her rooms, including a set of rings. I’m not sure what she did on those rings, but I just picture this tiny Empress lady doing some iron-crosses with a full-in dismount. But probably not. In any case, if pilates had been invented when Sisi was alive, I have no doubt she would have been totally into it.

After the museum I walked by the stables of the Lipizzaner stallions. You know them? They’re like the dancing horses? And boy are they pampered. I suppose if you are a highly regarded, well trained, dancing horse, you should get all the clean hay you want.

The last museum I checked out in Vienna was the Jewish Museum, cause you know, I have to check out these things. To put it bluntly, it was lame. You walk in and there’s a room with a case of a bunch of Jewish objects. That’s the main exhibit of the museum. It looked like a gift shop of really old stuff.

Upstairs was an exhibit of art of an Austrian Jew who converted to Catholicism. I felt like they were sort of stretching with that one. The top floor was this disjointed exhibit about Orthodox Jews going to the Alps for vacation. I found it rather random and hard to follow. Overall, not worth my 6 Euros.

Before I went to the train station I stopped back at the Naschmarkt for some snacks for the road.

I then ran into this giant protest running through town. I have no idea what they were protesting, but there were a lot of very impassioned college students holding signs and shouting things I could not understand.

I then successfully made my way to the train station where I boarded my train to Munich. It was an uneventful train ride and just four hours after boarding I was in another country.

I’m currently at my hotel with its tiny room and two beds. But both beds have chocolate candies on them, so I count it as a win.

Going to post this and head to bed. Have to decide what to do tomorrow!

Catching Up

Ok, I’m back to recap to you my exciting travels of the past two days. My nose has stopped running like a leaky faucet and I appear to be able to stay up past 10 PM, so things are looking up.

Yesterday we got to see a whole bunch of stuff. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we got to see, we weren’t allowed to photograph. I feel like this has been a very picture-light trip.

John, Tim, and I headed to Stephansdom to see if we could take a cool tour. Well, we found one. John is all about things that are underground, so he was hankering to head below the surface. And what’s something interesting below the surface? Crypts. We took a tour of the crypt below Stephansdom and it was equally intriguing and gross. Since it’s, you know, a crypt, we weren’t allowed to take pictures out of respect for all of the dead folks down there. So instead I’ll paint you a (most likely unclear) picture for you.

You walk into the church, which is big and magnificent and costs a bunch of Euros to see from the center, but none to see from the edges. To get to the crypt you take a bunch of stone steps down into a large room. Then it turns into a maze of creepy, dark hallways. The first hallway we saw held the bodies of the bishops, ranging from the 1600s (I think) until 2004. We were literally standing in a hallway with coffins on shelves lining the walls. And man, some of those dudes were short.

Afterwards we wound our way to yet another hallway with shelves lining the edges. Except these shelves held lots of metal urns that had been soldered shut. Can you guess what’s in those urns? Organs. Yup, they liked to take apart their folks and bury the organs in one place, the hearts in another (which I suppose is an organ, but a pretty special one), and the bodies in a third place. It was very Egyptian of them.

As we continued to go deeper into the crypt, the creepier it got. First we walked into a room that was used to bury whoever was willing to fork over the cash to be buried in a crypt. I’m not sure “buried” is really the right word. More like, “tossed into a huge pile”. But hey, at least they were in a crypt. You can look in and see piles and piles of bones where the ordinary folk who wanted a less than ordinary afterwards were.

But, the strangest rooms were the last ones we saw. Turns out all that tossing of the random bodies into these mass graves wasn’t very space efficient. So in order to cram a few more people in there, they decided to dig up the graves, clean off the bones, and very neatly, and precisely, stack them up in smaller rooms. Their spatial relations were impressive (even to me, master of the refrigerator packing). However, seeing neatly piled rows of bones with a skull here and there facing you definitely gave me the heeby-geebies.

After the crypt tour, we met up with the rest of the folk and headed to the Belvedere. Location of our unintentional, freezing cold, walking expedition for dinner from a few nights ago.

The Belvedere is this ridiculous set (yes, there are two) of palaces that face one another and today are museums.  The Upper Belvedere is a fine art museum, housing old paintings, the most famous one being “The Kiss” by Gustav Klimt. And in Vienna, they are all about “The Kiss”. In case you are wondering it looks like this:

The museum was ok, but our viewing of “The Kiss” got a bit obstructed by, you know, the fashion shoot that was going on in front of it. I have no idea what it was, but there were two models, all brooding and moody, posing for a photographer, and blocking my view.

The Lower Belvedere was dedicated to the life of Prince Eugene, who built the two palaces. Apparently he was sort of the snub-nosed, puny kid who grew up to be a ridiculous soldier, art collector, and intellectual. He was totally married to his work and never married a lady, and therefore had no kids. So after he died his whole fortune went to his kind not-very-attractive, not-very-exciting niece who went about a sold lots of it. Some of his stuff they have recovered, so of it is missing, but the fella sure collected a lot of stuff in his day.

After our tour of the museum Calvin and I headed to the Naschmarkt for some lunch. We walked up and down the stalls looking for something that wasn’t sausage or schnitzel or boiled beef before settling on doeners. And boy were they delicious. I must say they were better than the doeners back home.

We also had people talking to us in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean while pressing free samples of dried mango, wasabi peanuts, and other random treats in our hands.

After lunch I headed to the Imperial Treasury where they have some of the crowned jewels and other such fancy things. My pictures weren’t terrific which is why I’m not going to share them here, but there sure was a lot of bling back in the day. My favorite thing was probably the baby throne made for the son of Napoleon which looked like the most ornate baby crib ever made (and was made of solid silver and gilded with gold) and had enough pointy edges, that it’s a good thing the baby never really sat in it or else he probably would have poked his eyes out a few dozen times.

Dinner was a pretty calm affair. We just headed to a local brew pub and got a quick bite. I think we were all kind of over the heavy meals. I ordered a salad and the waiter seemed to have no idea as to what I was talking about when I ordered it, leading me to think no one ever actually orders a salad. I’m not sure people in Austria eat salad. Or fruits. Or vegetables. I sort of wonder how they don’t all have scurvy.

I then came home and passed out which is why this post is just going up now.

We’ve been better

Between the weather, the lack of vegetables, the aches, and the fact that a few of us have come down with clothes, I think most of us are ready to leave Vienna. I’m heading to Munich tonight and I excited for the change of scenery. I’ve got a nasty cold that’s been kicking my butt, so please excuse the lack of update for yesterday. I’ll try to post some pictures of yesterday and what I do today when I get to Munich.

Sorry!

This is the latest I’ve been up since I got here…

That’s right, the clock is rounding 12:30 AM and I’m pleased to say I’m still awake. Hopefully I finish writing this post before I fall asleep, but no promises.

Today we finally got to our finished product; the whole reason we’re here in Vienna. We spent a lot of the day playing with our big, shiny, new toys, learning how to use them, maintain them, and no break them. It was very cool.

After that we didn’t have too much time before everything started to close, so we took a quick jaunt out into the city. We first stopped at the State Room of the National Library because we wanted to see if it was as awesome in person as it was in the photographs. Turns out you have to pay 7 Euros to get into the room and quite frankly, 7 Euros is kind of a lot to stand in a room. So instead we wandered in like dumb tourists, took a quick look around, and skidaddled before we ticked off the workers there. But not before I took a quick and not-that-great photograph. It was a pretty impressive room, but we didn’t have much time to check it out.

By the time we finished that little adventure it was nearly 6 o’clock which meant everything was closed. We walked around for a little while trying to find something else interesting to see, but to no avail. We did go into the Augustinian Church where I took lots of blurry pictures and discovered it has a heart crypt in it. There are 54 hearts of Hapsburg rulers buried there, but (un)fortunately we weren’t able to see them. The above picture is the Rathaus (which is like city hall) and some horse’s butt.

We walk through the Museum Quarter nearly everyday to get to our hotel, so me and Maria Theresia have become tight.

We headed to this little Viennese pub near our hotel for dinner. The atmosphere was nice except for the excruciating amount of smoke in the place. We sat in the non-smoking section and still probably inhaled a pack’s worth of smoke. I got Zweibelrostbraten which is steak with fried onion straws and potatoes. It was so good! I’m not sure I was even that hungry, but I ate almost the entire thing. I also had some fruit wine which tasted like watered down Riesling, but it was enough to get the Asian glow going.

After dinner we headed down to this bar in town which is under a church. We hung out, relaxed, talked, and generally had a good time. The best (maybe most disturbing) part of the evening was getting stared down by a ridiculous accordion player while he played “Edelweiss”. It was awkward to look at him and awkward to look away.

Didn’t get to take too many photos today. I’m off to bed before another big day tomorrow. Gute Nacht!

It’s 30 Degrees Outside and 85 Inside

Let’s just say the hotel rooms are…a little warm. We’ve all turned our heat completely off and have been sleeping with the windows open, but man, the temperature in this room is HOT. In other news, the floors of the bathroom are heated which one wouldn’t normally think about, but once you’ve experienced it, I’m not sure I ever want to go back to regular old floors during the cold months.

Today was a pretty good day. After work we had a little time to walk around the city. Sadly I lost a mitten in the morning so I ended up with one cold hand. It’s chilly here. It’s not unbearable-I-can’t-open-my-eyes-and-my-legs-are-going-to-fall-off-cold, but it’s definitely still in the winter phase here. Just when it looked like spring was starting in DC.

We looked into going to the Opera but the only tickets that were available were either standing room only or the seats where you can’t actually see anything. We figured we’d try our luck at getting some standing room only tickets if we had the time, but a missed time dinner adventure sort of squashed those plans.

Look! It’s Hotel Sacher. They make cake. Or a torte. Called a Sachertorte. Betcha couldn’t have guessed that. I tried this last time I was here in Salzburg, but this is the original place. The cake is chocolate cake with an apricot filling and it’s kinda dry. Apparently it’s supposed to be that way. It’s also ridiculously expensive. I’m on the fence on whether I want to give it another try.

Dinner was…an experience. Actually, getting to dinner was an experience. It was suggested to us that we try this place called Salm Bräu which is this restaurant where they brew their own beer. Being that I’m with a bunch of beer appreciating fellas, this seemed like a good idea. The only problem is, we never really figured out where it was. Instead we hopped on the U-bahn, popped out at a station we thought was close, and started walking. And walking. And walking. And then we asked for directions because we had been walking for a really long time and it turned out we were walking in the wrong direction. So then we kept walking. And walking. And walking. And then we asked for directions again and it turned out we were sort of walking in the right direction. Then we all started losing feeling in our faces. But we kept walking. And walking. And walking. And when hope was almost lost, we stumbled upon the restaurant.

It’s this cool little brew pub where they have 4 of their beers on tap. Being that I was in Austria, at a brew pub, I figured I’d give beer another try. Yeah, being in another country doesn’t make me like beer more. I forget the exact name of my beer, but in the description it was “a beer for all ages!” We had pretzels with our beer and I felt very appropriately German. And then I drank a Coke.

For dinner I had spaezle. It was delicious and greasy and I couldn’t finish the whole thing. I asked for it to be wrapped up because I saw someone walking out with their meal wrapped like a swan and I was all about getting a bird-shaped doggie bag. Sadly, my leftovers were wrapped up in more of a…potato shape.

After dinner we came back to the hotel where I promptly fell asleep. I haven’t done a great job adjusting my sleep schedule here (which is apparent as I am writing this at 5:45 in the morning). However, I think I’m going to try to hit the sack for a few more winks. I wonder what kind of fun adventures are in store for us tomorrow!

I’m baackkk

Made it! Back in Vienna, pooped but excited. All and all, the trip wasn’t too bad. The lovely Andrew dropped me off at the airport and apparently with my big sweatshirt, my big jacket, and windpants, I look like a hooligan. I managed to make it through the ticketing line alright, but before going through security I got asked to step aside so they could swab my hands. They got a nice swab of vermicelli with fish sauce and some chocolate and vanilla swirl custard with jimmies. So apparently I’m not that sketchy.

The flight wasn’t too bad either. I had thought we were taking a United plane and I was going to have swanky seats in Economy Plus, but turns out we were just in a regular Austrian Airlines plane where all the seats are sized extra small. I actually slept for a decent amount of the trip rolled up into various shapes as the lady in front of me decided to recline her chair for THE ENTIRE TRIP. Thanks lady, I appreciated that.

As we were pulling up to the gate at the end of our journey, I looked over and noticed the lady sitting next to me was reading a book in Hebrew. So, somehow, I think I ended up sitting next to probably the only other Jewish person on the entire flight. We had some brief exchange about Hebrew and my knowledge of it, which inevitably lead to some confusion and then just some awkward silence. It was a fun fact to learn as the flight was ending though. Before that, she was just the lady who was compulsively putting on hand sanitizer all flight.

Getting into Vienna wasn’t too much of a hassle either. My giant, lime green suitcase was easy to find and everyone’s luggage made it Austria. Apparently my sketchy attire still looked sketchy in Vienna because I got stopped and given some extra special questioning about my visit to Europe by the customs folks.

But after that, the sketchy treatment stopped and the special treatment started. Being a girl, traveling with a bunch of boys means you get your bags carried for you by the taxi guy and the last room available when checking in early.

We didn’t do a whole lot today. After we got to the hotel, we sort of did a quick overview walk of Vienna. Having been here before, I did not feel the need to take a million pictures of all the landmarks again. This time I want to go and actually see stuff. Like the insides of the buildings. It’s a bit colder here than in MD and I’m glad I had my hat and gloves. Not everyone was so prepared so our walk was brief and ended with lunch in a cafe and a slightly testy Austrian lady.

No, this isn’t the testy Austrian lady. This is some ridiculous statue in the middle of the museum quarter. I don’t really get it. In truth, it sort of grosses me out. So naturally I had to take a picture of it.

After lunch, most of the crew went back to the hotel to relax, take a nap, and just hang. Calvin and I decided to press on, despite our tiredness and check out a museum. We headed to the Museum of Art History get our cultural fix.

It was a pretty cool museum as far as art museums go. We saw Egyptian art, Roman art, classical paintings, and best of all, there was an audio tour! I made sure to get all I could out of that audio tour. I learned fun facts about paintings like this one:

It’s called “The Bean King” and the dude on the right with the crown is, you guessed it, the king. The lady next to him is the prettiest lady at the party, so she’s the queen. The rest of the guys and the less-than-attractive women all play members of the court. It’s a big party and whoever finds the bean in the cake is king for the party. It sounds like a King cake for Mardi Gras. So, the dude behind the king holding the fish to his mouth plays the official taster for the court and the guy on the left, looking like he doesn’t feel so hot, is the court doctor. I felt the need to take a picture of this painting, because really, how many paintings are in museums of guys projectile vomiting?

After the museum we headed back to the hotel to meet up with the group for dinner. We went back to the same restaurant near our hotel that we visited last time. But this time we knew we had to pay for the appetizers.

Now I’m back at the hotel, sweating in my overheated room and falling asleep. In fact, I fell asleep for a few hours until I woke up and realized I forgot to post anything for today. So, internet, here you go. Or rather, mom, here you go. I’m off to bed now…a fun day of work tomorrow!

Just real quick…

I’m heading out shortly for a week-long trip to Vienna and Munich. It’s mostly for work, but I plan on having some fun along the way too. There will be incessant updates of every minute detail of my day, so be on the lookout for that. But, before I go, I just have to leave you with one thing.

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream.

Please excuse the terrible photo. I’m working on it.

Let’s just say, that liquid nitrogen ice cream is…awesome. It’s smoother and creamier than regular ice cream and while making it, it’s practically required to stir while doing your best evil laugh. MWAHAHAHAH!

Then eat it with some of the best chocolate chip cookies ever…and well, life is complete.

Alright, gotta run! Catch ya on the flip side!

Hamantaschen

Today is Purim. Heard of it? It’s awesome. Purim is a holiday full of festivities, costumes, gifts, and general good cheer. The Purim story has scandal, manipulation, one really evil fella, a righteous dude, a cool queen, and plenty of intrigue.

That evil dude is named Haman and we hate him so much, when reading the Purim story we scream and stomp and bang to drown his name out. We also make cookies in reference of him. Hamantaschen are triangular cookies traditionally filled with poppy seeds or prune filling, but these days we also include our variety of jams, jellies, and other sweet fillings.

I whipped up a batch of these the other day in about an hour. But I forgot about the proper folding method for this specific recipe which led to some less than attractive cookies. So I raided some pictures from last year’s batch of cookies to show the proper way to make a pretty, and triangular, cookie.

Hamantaschen

adapted from Smitten Kitchen

• 8 Tbsp unsalted butter, softened
• 3 oz cream cheese at room temperature 3 Tbsp sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp orange zest
• 1 1/3 cups plus 4 tsp flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• jams, poppy seed filling, etc

Cream the butter and cream cheese together until smooth. Then add the sugar and beat for another minute. Add the egg, vanilla, orange zest, and salt and mix until well combined. Then add the flour until incorporated. The dough will still be a bit sticky.

Form the dough into a large disc, wrap in plastic wrap, and refrigerate until firm. Since I was short on time, I stuck my dough in the freezer for about 20 minutes.

After the dough has firmed up, roll it out on a well floured surface to about 1/4″ thick. Cut out circles. As you can see, I used an IKEA cup, which I think is about 2″ in diameter.

Spoon about a teaspoon of filling into to the center of the circles. Poppy seed filling is my favorite, but I also used raspberry preserves, and blackberry preserves. Apricot preserves are another popular filling.

To make them triangular shaped, fold up the dough on three sides and squish the dough together. As you can see in the picture above, I simply pinched the corners. This led to a big batch of cookie rounds with hot jam oozing out. My hamantaschen did not stay together. I realized I did not have this problem last year, so going back to my older pictures, I discovered my previous, and successful, folding method.

As you can see, I folded each third up and layered it down over the other sides at each corner. This horizontal squishing method seemed to work a lot better than my pinching method of this year. Live and learn I suppose (although, apparently live, learn, and remember is what I needed to do).

Bake them for 18-20 minutes in a 350º oven. Makes about 20-22 cookies. Yum!