Continuing my trend of not knowing what the heck I was seeing in Vienna, here are some pictures from my trip to Schonbrunn Palace.  It used to be a residence for the monarchy, but now it’s a museum where you can view the rooms, chambers and gardens. 

Not that we did any of that…

It was super-nice outside so we mostly just wandered around the main square.

The walkway to the palace is quite big and lots of people hang around.  You can get horse-drawn carriages to take you around the palace (if someone doesn’t jump ahead and steal your carriage from you – yeah, that happened). 

The right side of the palace was being renovated, so they had this strange covering over it (you can see this in the above photo, behind the fountain).  Truthfully, it made the area look like a movie set.  I found this to be a trend in European renovations – instead of leaving a white plastic sheet wrapped around a building they try to cover it with a photo of what’s inside.  It’s helpful, but it’s also a little like cheating.  Seriously, you could have anything under there.

It was a beautiful day, so we wandered around outside for a while (getting a bit of a glimpse at the gardens) before moving on to something else. 

If you’re reading this hoping for some history, today’s not your day (I couldn’t find much on Wikipedia).  If you’re looking for some views on my experience, it’s also not your day.  I mostly just admired the palace’s design and took tons of pictures.  The cloud formations were crazy.

Maybe next time I’ll make it inside.