Of Waltzes and Wizards

So, when we left Salzburg on Tuesday morning it was POURing rain. Perfect day for a train ride to Vienna, we thought. The previous two days in Salzburg we had beautiful weather, so we´re grateful for that.

It was still raining in Vienna upon arrival, but not too heavily. So we were able to walk to the city center, to one of the places we wanted to visit: the Haus Der Musik (House of Music). It´s an extremely cool (and diverse) museum on four floors, with lots of high-tech hands-on stuff for the ever-so-slightly museum-fatigued. (Wanted to see how many hyphens I could use in one sentence there.) (And brackets.)

One floor had a little history of the Vienna Philharmonic. The second floor was when things got really fun. There was a room which simulated soundwaves as experienced by a human embryo! (Wow.) (Not done with the brackets yet.) In another room, they had a "virtual conductor" feature, where you held a digital baton and conducted the Philharmonic on a huge screen and they played Eine Kleine Nachtmusik acoording to how fast or slow you waved the thing. (Actually, with most people the orchestra stopped abruptly after a few bars and the bassoonist got up and complained about the conductor in German, with huge exaggerated hand motions, and everyone watching laughed.)

The third floor featured a bunch of great composers for whom Vienna was part of their personal or work history: Haydn, Mozart, Strauss, Schubert, Beethoven, Mahler, and all the weird 12-tone guys from the "second" Viennese school: Schönberg, Webern, etc. (Not that many of you would care too much about this kind of stuff, but we found it interesting. OK, Nelson found it interesting. Terri, not so much.) (But she liked the fun hands-on stuff.) (I LOVE brackets! They´re the best.)

When we got out of the music museum, the rain had stopped, and the sky had even begun to open up. What a gift. So, we thought, "We´re in a big city. I´ll bet they´d have movies in English." Sure enough, we found such a place. Five minute walk from our hotel. We went to a late evening Harry Potter show! For the record, we both enjoyed it tremendously. It is very interesting to see how the different directors treat the stories. But this isn´t a film blog, so I´ll reserve further comment for now :).

On the luggage front...a couple of days ago we followed our travel agent´s advice and decided not to forward any more of our Europe ´temporary´addresses to British Airways. So, our home address is now the only one that appears on our file. We think there is probably a good chance they´ll arrive home before we do. In retrospect, we maybe should have done this awhile ago. That way, we wouldn´t have been so burdened (that may even be too strong a word -- we are really enjoying ourselves) with the whole "maybe today, maybe tomorrow" question. But hope is difficult to abandon, and that´s probably a good thing.