Long time!!

Hello everyone!  It's been quite a while since our last post!  Sorry, it's been rather uneventful around here, and other than a few little get-togethers it's been rather slow.

New Things... hmmm
Alex went home for a couple weeks.  She unfortunately had to go home to write an exam however she thinks she did pretty well on it.  The other reason she went home was to get her wisdom teeth out...  Not fun.  This happens tomorrow! So she'll be home for another week then back here to Vienna.  She had some slight problems with flights (they canceled her original flight) due to the snow in Detroit.  We rebooked the flight and she was actually home a bit earlier than expected. 

The show is going very well!! I'm getting much better and have started to learn the sequences for the stage.  Hopefully within a few weeks I'll be in the act!  I've learned lots of new skills as well, most involve transferring from one end of the board to the other end!  I am getting much more comfortable with the show and performing it and I'm starting to feel comfortable in the character too. 

Today and tomorrow are the "double-dark" a fancy way to say 2 days off instead of the normal one.  I went to the Museum of Natural History today!  It was very cool!  So much old historical stuff.  I really liked the displays of old tools made of rock, stone and bone.  Very neat to see all the modifications that had been made over thousands of years.  The museum was set up in a way that you could follow from the ice age all the way through to the current time.  There was a huge, I mean really HUGE, display of almost every known animal in the world.  They were of course all on display and stuffed but it was interesting to see.  They had them in taxonomic order which was great because all the related animals from every continent were beside each other.  (ex. All the cats were all together.)  There were displays of all the world's bears, apes, monkeys, equines, large land mammals, whales, etc. 

A while back there was a display in Toronto called Body Works; human bodies, skinned, and displayed in everyday situations.  It was highly controversial but it was also very educational.  Today I saw the animal version, Body Worlds of Animals.  They had animals that had skin removed to show their inner workings and they were so well preserved.  There was an elephant, giraffe, horse, ox, ostrich, camel, gorilla and human amongst some others.  They had put the human and gorilla beside each other in the exact same position too.  The elephant had been expanded so you could actually see inside and examine all the different parts of its body.  There was also "art" hanging on the walls and when I looked closer they were micro-slices of animals.  Picture a real cross-section of an animal, they created it using a very thin laser slicer that literally sliced a piece out of the animal and put it between two panes of glass. It was amazing and a little scary all at the same time.  This was definitely the most interesting part of my day.  It was very good too that the sign that said they had all died from non-human related deaths: some of old age, some of sickness, but none were killed or hunted.

Also very interesting was the number of kids in the building.  They were in this exhibit and were doing projects for school.  Even a class of kindergarten kids was walking through and they stopped in the middle to examine the elephant.  Pretty crazy field trip!  Dr. Gunther von Hagens is the inventor of Plastination (replacing bodily fluids with plastic) and his idea for this was that textbooks are not detailed enough to study and that looking inside an animal required the real animal to be present.

  Unfortunately I couldn't take pictures...  They didn't allow cameras inside.  I could have sneaked one in but it wasn't worth it.  I just went and enjoyed it.  I found some photos online and the website for the exhibit is here.  http://www.bodyworldsofanimals.com/en.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Expanded Elephant

  How's the snow at home!??  There's none here.  In fact it has been very nice here.  Every day has been sunny and about 0 degrees.  I went for a few walks in the morning to work (about 2 hours) and the entire way is through parks and on a no car Island.  It is very pretty and I've seen a bunch of new birds!  This is a photo of where I like to walk.  We live right behind the big pointy church on the left, the water is the Donau River and the channels on the island. I'm about 3 km from home looking back on what I just walked. 

Now, how about some living animals??!!  Here are just a few of the new birds I've added to my European list.

Great Crested Grebe

Great-Spotted Woodpecker

Tufted Duck

Great Cormorant

 
 

Little Grebe

European Robin

So, there you have it.  That's what has been happening.  Hopefully you've all been enjoying the blog and sorry for the long time off.  I'll try to get another post on here within the next few days.  Maybe a "Top Ten thing I've learned About Vienna" List...
Miss you all!!  Oh and just in case anyone was wondering... It has been since Christmas since I cut my hair... It is getting longer now, mom will be happy (she's always liked my hair longer) and apparently I still have to grow it.  The show has a certain look and I'm almost there... pictures to come soon too...
'Til next time...
Aa