August 3

Today was a Sunday, which means that many places are closed because Vienna is a Catholic city. Many of the museums were still open though, so many of us decided to go to the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (military museum). The museum was located in the middle of the arsenal buildings that Franz Josef decided to have built to strengthen the country’s defenses after the 1848 rebellion. It would have been helpful to know some German while we were in this museum because all of the signs for the exhibits were written in German. It also would have been helpful to know German because we walked right past the sign that told us that we needed to buy picture passes in order to take pictures. We eventually bought them after one of the guards told us about the passes. The museum was laid out in chronological order and had exhibits for all things military for all of the stages in Austrian history. I was especially excited to see the bloodied jacket and car that Franz Ferdinand was in when he was assassinated. The museum also had some cool WWII propaganda signs. I would have liked to see more Hitler exhibits, though. All in all, the museum was pretty exciting. It was very large and beautiful, so I took many pictures of the displays and the actual building, which had huge vaulted ceilings. After the museum, a few of us went to go find the schnitzel restaurant, Zu Den Zwei Liesln, which we looked up in the Lonely Plant guidebook. We got lost a couple of times along the way, but it was fun traveling around a neighborhood that we probably wouldn’t have gone to otherwise. Once we actually found the restaurant, we saw that it was located in a beautiful little courtyard. The atmosphere was very relaxed and we all got to try our first taste of schnitzel. I got the turkey schnitzel, which I liked very much. After lunch we all went home to catch up on some reading because we were exhausted from all the walking.
The word of the day is meistens, which means “mostly”. I remember this word from when I took German in high school.