Last Full Day in Vienna (A guest post by Zoë: | October 11)

The last full day we were in Vienna, we met with Patrick’s advisor’s older daughter, L, and Patrick’s advisor at the Technical museum! Me and Mom did not go on our big museum day, because Mom didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on a possibly disappointing museum (this was because the Literature museum was pretty disappointing). But, on Sunday, we went with Patrick to the museum and… IT WAS SUPER COOL!

There was so much stuff to do, and right at the entrance…we saw an F-1 car (are you jealous yet, Ben and Miriam?): 

There was a lot of stuff to do. I got to see the difference between so many types of steel that all looked the same, and let me tell you, steel is really pretty when you look really closely!

[We learned about simple machines with cool hands-on demonstrations you could try].

I lifted L (it was pretty hard) and then she lifted me (which she did easily). Then we worked together to lift Patrick and his advisor, which was super hard, and they lifted us together so easily.

I walked in a…what do I call it–a hamster wheel pulley thingy?...to lift a basket of apples–my arms and legs were so tired after.

There was a pedestrian light thingy, and I completely broke the laws of traffic, and crossed the (fake) street when the pedestrian light was red. 

[She thought Benjamin would be jealous of this LEGO oil rig]:

[There was a rather large installation about sustainability. We were laughing about their anti-air conditioning exhibit because "all you need is some shade" felt laughable given Qatar's climate, though I suppose it's largely reasonable in Austria.]

[And I can't believe Zoë didn't talk about the scream room! L was very excited to show this exhibit to us. It's a little booth you can step into and then you're supposed to scream and it will measure your decibels. Both L and Zoë made it to right around 130 dB, which is pretty impressive.]

[We spent a long time taking turns screaming. I joked that I need a booth like this in my house—it's not quite sound proof but it does do a good job of muffling things!]

[After L left (she had to finish her homework), we spent some time in a room about...calculators and typesetting? They had stations where you could learn to use an abacus and other early counting machines, they had stations where you had to set text in Gothic letters...in mirror image of the script you're asked to transcribe so that it will print properly, and so forth. Zoë had a lot of fun here.]

Patrick gave me 10 Euros to spend in the gift shop*, so I got 3 Construction Block animals. 

Zoë at the gift shop

Two [were] for me, and one [was] for Phoebe so she doesn’t hound me for gifts, because I seriously don’t want Phoebe to hound me because it is seriously annoying. [And because she was being generous and thought Phoebe would like the puppy, which is absolutely true].

[It was fun to get to spend the day with Uncle Patrick and get to know his advisor, who has been so kind to him the last few years—Patrick's been renting his flat from his advisor's father, and is often welcomed to family events, etc. Afterwards we met up with Hadis, who had to work earlier in the day.]

[And that about sums up our trip to Vienna—it was a whirlwind of a week! Here's Zoë home in the Doha airport]:

[Our flight home was pretty uneventful...except that when we landed in Abu Dhabi the boarding pass on our phone told us to go to one gate, which we did, but then when I checked the board in the airport it told us that we needed to be at an entirely other gate (on the other side of the airport) so we ended up having to run to the other side of the airport, but we made it and everything was fine. And I think I prefer to travel through the day, ending our travel around 10:00 PM rather than beginning our travelling at 10:00 PM...]

*A rare occurrence in my family–we’re too big that it gets expensive.