The Belvedere Palace is famous for bringing some of the best artwork in the world to Vienna. We were excited to take the kids to see the palace and enjoy the paintings, but things didn’t quite go as planned…
Since we don’t have a car and have to take public transportation everywhere, getting to the Belevdere was a little bit out of the way from our normal route. As we were waiting for one train, we noticed a train crossing in the other direction carrying semi trucks. Actually it was the second train like this we saw. The first one, we said to ourselves, “what a funny sight to see a train of tractor trailers, we should have taken a picture….” When we saw the next train we were ready! What a strange sight indeed. Usually you’d fill the tractor trailer with freight and drive it to the destination… There must have been 15 trucks with trailers attached on this train.
When we finally got to the palace, the kids were starting to act up. Right as we were about to buy the tickets (which weren’t so cheap), Elora started whining and Ollie turned around and started pulling her hair. This is what he usually does to express his displeasure with her whining. We made the wise decision of putting off the museum trip until another day. It’s just not worth trying to “endure” a lovely museum with two screaming kids — plus we’d be those parents that everyone is looking at with the whiney kids!
Instead we went outside into the gardens to let the kids run around. They were much happier. Elora really liked the Sphinxes which lined the garden. So did a bunch of other tourists from what we could gather. If you look closely at the… er… breasts on the Sphinx you’ll notice the paint is worn out more in that area. “Why is that?” I hear you ask. Well we wondered the same thing until we saw an Italien guy and his girlfriend waltz right up to one of the Sphinxes, place both hands on its breasts and pose for a picture. Unfortunately, by the time we had the camera out and turned on to capture a picture to show you he stopped posing. After observing this strange ritual we observed that the statues with breasts in reaching distance had all the paint worn off, while those breasts that were too high to reach were nice and shiny. Odd people…
Oliver really loves fountains. Even more, he loves crawling under chains blocking the way that say, “do not pass.” 
We made a good decision not to go inside because the kids had such a wonderful time running around exploring the garden.
Ollie was intrigued by taking a few self portraits and examining the pictures afterwards.
Elora saw this statue and wanted us to take her picture in front of it. She’s such a cute little monkey.
