The picturesque Schloß Schönbrunn in Vienna.

At this point in our trip, I was beginning to make good use of foreground objects to hide people. There are still some people visible in this shot, but I think the low angle coupled with the flowers — and then the out-of-focus flowers — really works well.

The colours — the reds and purples of the flowers, and the blue of the sky — contrast well with the yellow of the building. I think it might be a little overprocessed and the conversion from Adobe RGB to sRGB made it look a little sick (i.e. green) which I possibly overcompensated by using Lightroom’s “tint” feature, as well as the sky changing colour a bit much. Very annoying and I still haven’t got the process down pat.

As we walked through Schloß Schönbrunn towards the exit, there was a small chapel within the building. Inside the chapel was a man playing an acoustic guitar, with classical music. We stepped inside for a moment to listen to the man play; without amplification, the music filled the entire room. Most certainly a magical moment.

Day Twenty-One
Vienna
28 August 2007 22:06

This morning we took an underground train, with most of our souvenirs in tow, to the central Vienna post office. We spent the next hour and a half there. After packing our souvenirs tighthly into a box we approached the desk to find the clerk didn’t speak any English.

We filled out part of a customs form but couldn’t understand much of it. The man pointed to another clerk and told us he spoke English. As we approached his desk he walked off. It took him 15 minutes to return and when he did he was rather grumpy. Eventually we were able to fill out the forms and send our packages back home (hopefully!).

Since we had all day public transport tickets we took a train to Schloß Schönbrunn where we checked out the outside of the castle and it’s expansive grounds. There is a large fountain with a large column filled with heiroglyphs but apparently they are meaningless. Not wanting to tour the innards of yet another castle we left and took more trains to what seem to be persistent fairgrounds.

There is a ferris wheel which was created in 1897 so we rode the very large wheel. Each large cabin rocks back and forth when people move to one side or another and feels quite unstable which is rather a funny feeling.

It took three trains to get back to our hotel, we went out and got some Chinese take away — chicken, vegetables and rice — which had heaps of chicken and tasted like it also had a large dose of MSG.