Margaux Rhymes with Fargo

My weekend trip to Vienna, Austria was especially exciting because I met up with my childhood friend Kristin who studied in Copenhagen for the semester.  As we wandered around the town, a couple of things stood out:

• A burger joint called “Said the Butcher to the Cow” boasting a menu of burgers, gin, and cheesecake had some pretty entertaining signs in the windows

• It’s so cold that the horses need earmuffs too

• Very, very sparkly boots are the norm

• We climbed 300 spiral stairs to the top of a cathedral tower and were rewarded by a view of cranes over the city.  The cathedral itself was pretty though.

• Flamingo freaking out at the zoo

• Lizard climbing wall at the zoo. I was pretty excited about it.

• Baby elephant trying so so hard to imitate the older one but it took him about 5 solid minutes to break off a branch of the tree and it was super cute

• One of the orangutans was sitting cross-legged in front of the glass and just had his whole flat face smooshed up against it.  We were there watching the other orangutans in the enclosure for a solid ten minutes and he didn’t move once, even when a little kid came up and pressed his own face against the glass.  The kid lost the staredown.

• “Breeding is my favorite but I also like to cackle a lot” — sign at the Vienna Zoo

• The quartet that we went to see was in a super tiny room and the musicians were in 18th century garb which was pretty entertaining.  Also we listened to music composed by Mozart in the “Mozarthaus”, so that’s pretty cool.

• The ornaments at the various Christmas markets were unreal.

• I got some pretty awesome shot glasses for my boyfriend’s brothers since the family used to live in Australia.  I’m pretty proud of this Christmas find.  It’s gonna be pretty awkward if they read this before Christmas.

• One of the rhinos at the zoo started totally freaking out.  There were two rhinos and the outdoor enclosure was split into three sections by walls.  Each rhino had their own section, and a herd of deer had the third section.  However, there were vertical bars between the sections (yellow in the picture) that allowed the deer to go into the rhinos’ sections but the rhinos were trapped in their respective sections.  So the deer start taunting the rhino (or at least that’s how I interpreted what was happening) and he charged all the way from one end of his section towards the deer at the other end, who immediately scattered.  He then indignantly returned to his corner, at which point the deer started coming back in and annoying him again.  So that whole thing repeated multiple times, and then the other rhino started getting agitated and started following the motion of the first rhino charging up and down the pen.  She then slipped in some mud and tipped over which was pretty entertaining but if a rhino is capable of being embarrassed she definitely was.  Then the two rhinos bumped horns through the vertical bars, and the second rhino started galloping about her section (do rhinos gallop? canter perhaps? just running would be boring, but charging in circles doesn’t seem right either…).  Kristin and I were there for a solid twenty minutes watching this whole thing unfold and by the end there was a whole audience just watching the show.

• Kristin and I tried curling at one of the Christmas markets.  We were totally shown up by some little Austrian kids, but that’s okay.

• And the moment you’ve all been waiting for: donkeys playing the accordion on a bench in a park.  I would love to think this is a regular occurrence.  Maybe sometimes they do it at the zoo.