Day 7 - Sat Nov 18 - Vienna

Nothing Scheduled Day

I had scheduled nothing for this day, figuring we would make our way to the Prater to play pinball.  We slept in, which was nice since staying up late with Peter is exhausting to say the least.  Something else happened though, namely...

Shopping!!!

I received a special surprise today, when I was invited to go grocery shopping with Hanni and Peter. Shopping is one of my favorite pastimes. We drove to a store called Billa Plus. There is an Austrian brand of dairy products called NOM, which seems appropriate for food (nom-nom-nom), but it actually stands for Niederoesterreiche Moelkerei (Lower Austria Dairies.) The word I also like is Schlagobers which is Beaten Cream - we call it Whipped Cream of course. We whip it - they beat it.

Pinball
Peter is the one who seduced me into the world of pinball when we were 14/15 year olds.  We used to play hooky and go to a coffee house and stay there until school officially ended, then go home (yep, great day at school Dad!)  I do NOT know how we got away with it, but we spent a lot of afternoons playing pinball!

Today we headed to the permanent amusement park called the Prater to play some pinball (PinballMap.com showed some places there.)  The Prater is famous for its Giant Ferris Wheel which was built in 1896-1897 for the 50 Year Jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef in 1898. We played at 2 different venues for about 3 hours. This was my last full day in Vienna.

At the Jolly Joker, they used tokens, so I plunked down 20 Euros (about $23) and got 20 tokens.  I seemed to get a lot of replays so we had a pile of tokens left over.  I wanted to get the other place and Peter suggested to eat, so we had a Schnitzel Semmel (a smaller Wiener Schnitzel on a typical Viennese bun.)  We went to the other place which used Euro coins and I exchanged only a 10 Euro bill.  After playing there, we went back to the original place to get rid of the tokens, but after 3 hours, we were tired or bored of playing, so I found a dad who was being pestered by his kids and gave him the rest of my tokens.  Peter had some tickets he had won off a machine and handed them over as well.  The dad was extremely appreciative, but the best was the one of the boys who was perhaps 7 or 8 years old looking at us very sincerely and thanking us.  That really made it worth it!