One thing I remember seeing the last time I was in Vienna is an area called the Hundertwasser, named after the architect who designed it. It is a one-block building that is completely unlike anything else in Vienna – it’s funky and the walls are curvy and are painted in crazy colors and what not. It doesn’t register as European and certainly not as Viennese. Molly and I decided to spend a day exploring our new city and our first stop was the Hundertwasser via public transportation. Vienna’s UBahn is convenient and extremely easy to navigate, so we had no problems getting to the Hundertwasser (although we had to take a bus, then the UBahn, then a tram…but we made it). My second visit to the area left me less impressed than the first, as it was smaller and dirtier than I remembered. But we had a nice lunch at an outdoor café and watched the storm clouds roll in and out of the sky. Side note: my Coke was 2 euros more expensive than the glass of wine Molly had with her meal. Only in Europe. After the Hundertwasser, we went in search of a giant carnival ride that Molly had seen in the distance from Kaisermuhlen. She had some idea of where we were going thanks to Google, but weren’t quite sure. What we stumbled upon was a full-out amusement park in the middle of the city, called The Prater. It wasn’t like an American amusement park, though, because the rides were much smaller in scale and were a mixture of the older rides at Six Flags and the type of rides you would see at a traveling carnival. Also, there were numerous types of the same kinds of rides (I think I counted four bumper cars), leading me to believe that each section or possible even each ride is individually owned. This thought was also fueled by the fact that you had to buy individual tickets for each ride, not at a central ticket stand but in front of each ride. Molly and I only went on two rides. The first had about 10 seats at the end of a long pole, and you got turned and twisted all over the place. Because we were the only ones on it and there was no one else in line, the worker gave us an extra ride and we flipped all over the place for what seemed like forever. Next we went on the ride she had seen from our neighborhood….it was a giant “swing” ride, like one of my favorites at Six Flags in St. Louis, but it was about 10x the side. I think it’s something like 15 stories high, but we were both looking forward to it. Mistake. We sat next to each other in these little swings and all that was holding us in was a thin piece of metal sitting atop our laps. As we went higher and higher, we both started freaking out and realized we were wayyyy to old to be enjoying the ride. We were scared out of our minds and I kept picturing myself slipping out of the swing and falling to my death. I closed my eyes for the majority of the ride. The rest of the time we just walked around the park and had a good time people watching . All the people working the rides were young men, probably from the 18-30 range and some of them were actually pretty hot! Too bad they were carnies, and the German accents didn’t help. An interesting thing about the park was the pony rides….rather than having a carousel with fake horses they had real horses that were attached to a center pole and kids could sit on the horses as they walked/ran round and round in circles. It was bizarre. I think my favorite thing in the Prater, though, was the game stand that was called “Daytona Beach.”
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