2010/09/06 The Orang Utan whisperer

After a nice promenade through Hietzing..
..my dear cousin Caty showed us the Zoo Schönbrunn. Not only did she do a study on the Orang Utans, but also is she now hosting the feedings there.
However, she is a great insider, who could teach us a lot about the animals there. Moreover, when the Orang Utans saw her, they got up and sat by us. Impressive!

Besides the animals, the zoo offers great views over the city and the Schönnbrunn castle.
I most certainly enjoyed sightseeing with my family; so did our little baby daughter, as you can see on akigaki.meonnet.com [password same as usual].

2010/09/04 Vienna downtown

We dedicated day 2 of our trip to Vienna's downtown..
..with its impressive monuments..
..and architecture.

It was quite a hike,..
..but regardless we stopped at the Naschmarkt, to try all different kinds of crazy food.

These dragon fruit really don't taste nearly as good as they look!

2010/09/03 The garden

My mother-in-law Cindy experienced her first train ride..
..on the way to Vienna. Since we had plans for the evening, we just chilled a little in Schönbrunn,..
and showed her the beauty of the castle's gardens.
Her affection for plants enabled me a completely new perspective on the Austrian style.

Its floral architecture simply is stunning.. I still don't know, if this is a good or a bad thing, though.

2009/06/06-07 austria's east coast

for the weekend, i decided to hang out in vienna an introduce matt to some of my closest friends and some of the city's most wonderful spots.

as it turned out, we first went to lower austria, to have breakfast with the schmidts, at whose wedding we had been a year ago. the happy couple will be joined by offspring pretty soon (september), so this made the meeting even more special.


as we had such a great time together,

breakfast turned out to be a hanging out all-day at their place. great!



the next day we went to vienna downtown, to meet caty & kristian (who were working) as well as judith & daniel, who we enjoyed the donaukanaltreiben with. this party by the danube turn out to be a playground for adults.

matt climbing the wall; fortunately kristian belaid.

the artistic stuff was fun, too. looks as if i really got it *smile*.

*give it to me, baby*

as if this had not been joyful enough, we went on to the wiener prater, one of the world's oldest funparks.

matt was incredibly motivated, and that's why he was able to convince me to do some crazy stuff..

do not look too happy, now do i?!

it might take awhile before i forgive him letting me do this..

well, but i survived; fair enough, i suppose.

via the historical downtown..

spanische hofreitschule

wiener staatsoper with a live TV coverage from the show inside

..we finally made our way back home to hietzing, where a great bbq was waiting for us.

had some good times!

new years eve 2oo8/2oo9

for new year's eve we went to vienna to caty's place in hietzing to enjoy a lovely evening with a bunch of lovely people.

for dinner we had a so-called 'raclette'.


to support digestion [well, that's a myth, actually] we drank some slibovitz, which kristian's dad had burnt himself.

that made us motivated to play 'activity', a funny game that makes people describe weird terms orally, by drawing or by doing some scharade's. to overcome the language boarders we used the dictionnary.. which led to some confusion once or twice [or do you know, what a bow-tie weight is?!].

midnight came fast and after waltzing and kissing everyone we went outside to watch the fireworks. man, it was cold.. we really had to take care of each other!

moni & matt

alex & judith

kristian & caty

tini & jakob

the gang..

to warm ourselves up again, matt showed us some american moves.. besides the hip hop dancing we really digged the 'strokin'..

one more time, baby

happy new year to everyone!

2008/05/24-25 vienna

after the wedding we went on to go to vienna - to visit both my family and the wonderful city. well, it started nice with breakfast and the güttner residence..

.. then we met some people at the well-known naschmarkt.

during our walk through the city afterwards..

i started feeling bad.. and after an hour or two i had to go home: to stay in bed for the next days.

while i had the flue matt went to the city again to get to know schönbrunn, wiener schnitzel and the 'gürtel'.