Psalm 119:18: 7 May: Vienna, day 2

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

7 May: Vienna, day 2

Today being Monday, we decided to visit the Schönbrunn Palace and gardens, which includes the Vienna Zoo. The gardens were enormous – which may have explained why there were so many daisies and dandelions in the lawns? (Imagine the conversation: ‘So, what do you do for a living?’ ‘Oh, I spray the weeds at Schönbrunn. It’s a full-time job – once you finish, you have to start all over again.’) They had a hedge maze and labyrinth there, which we had a go at for something a bit different. Then we wandered around the zoo.

I was really impressed with the zoo. They say they have over 600 different species of animal there, and the zoo is certainly huge and it would easy to spend the whole day there. They had regular feeding of the animals (we saw the tigers, jaguars, pandas, elephants, and sea lions being fed). Although it’s one of the oldest zoos in the world, it has kept up with the times – the animals aren’t kept in sterile enclosures or cages (like at the Berlin Zoo for example). Also, they didn’t group the animals by type (e.g. putting all the monkeys together), but rather by the region of the world they come from. In some cases they had different types of animals in the same enclosure, for example the Barbary sheep and Barbary apes. Watching them for a while, we even saw one of the apes grooming one of the sheep! So I would highly recommend the zoo to anyone visiting Vienna – and it was very reasonably priced too.