Spanish Horses, South American Butterflies, and Viennese Bumper Cars
Bee and I always know where we’re going, even if it has yet to be decided or we don’t end up leaving the hotel until noon. I don’t really understand how we know this, it’s just that there are things that we know and things that we don’t know and have yet to form an opinion about. We don’t allow the latter to slow us down, I guess, the way it almost always slows down men and women when they’re together. When you’re dating someone you always have to know where and why and for how long and “are we actually going somewhere?” Thankfully, Bee and I are neither dating, nor do we care about any of that, and we still managed to get around Vienna in serious Austrian style.
Ok, I’ll get straight to the reason we were there - to see the horses, of course. The Spanish Riding School, which is in Vienna, Austria, just to be confusing, is the world famous training school of the Lipizzaner stallions. I can sense already that 98% of you, as my audience, are now fading away as soon as you saw that this was going to be about horses. At one point in my life, I would have thought, oh my gosh, I should try to make this more interesting so that people will keep reading it, but then one day I got old and thought, the hell with you people. I find horses intensely interesting and anyway, what are you doing right now besides sitting in front of a computer pretending to work? You don’t have anything more interesting to read right now or you’d be reading it. And so you will suffer me this horse story.
These horses put on a wintertime show in their grand riding academy building that includes high level movements that take years to train. I’ll spare you the names of all these things since they won’t mean a thing to you, but suffice it to say they include cool tricks like leaping into the air and kicking out their back legs at the apex of their jump, with or without a rider mounted. If you think about it, it is pretty amazing that you can train a horse to do any of this stuff, since they don’t respond well to voice commands like dogs do and most of these moves don’t come naturally to them, such as rearing and then hopping forward on both hind legs, or trotting in place without moving forward. Even more surprising was what we learned about their riders. Despite Bee’s perseverance in suggesting that I try riding Lipizzaner stallions during the year off I was considering taking from work to pursue my horse ambitions, you do have to be a man to join the Spanish Riding School (not surprising), and you don’t have to have prior riding experience - in fact it’s discouraged. The trainers here believe that any prior riding experience you might have won’t be applicable here (unless it’s dressage, and even then, not so much) and could potentially slow you down. Personally I think they just want to mold their students to their training ideals, but hey, how can I hold it against them when everyone who’s ever trained riding students wants to do that, including me?
The other peculiar fact besides riding school applicants being selected on the basis of having no horse experience, was the rule that they are also chosen based on build. While this isn’t a complete shocker (you’re just not going to make much of a basketball player if you’re 4′11″), it’s not necessarily an athletic requirement. It is true that it’s just easier to ride horses if you have a short torso and long legs, but there are plenty of riders who don’t meet this criteria and do quite well competitively since the horse plays a large part in a rider’s success. But like a classic huntseat equitation class, riders with this build are selected over others simply because it flatters the horse much more and looks better in general. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the leggy, tall riders parading around the arena (and who Birgit and I were deciding upon for my next date) were really only around 5′5″ and it was all a sexy illusion!
In the summer the horses don’t perform, they just train. They’re so popular that you still have to pay to get into their training sessions to watch them trot around for two hours. Of course, being the horse freaks that we are, Bee and I paid and stood there for about an hour and a half waiting for people to get bored and leave before us. They did, but only about half an hour before the training ended. One thing I learned that I should share - if you ever go to watch an actual performance you should definitely shell out the cash to get front row seats. Anywhere else and you seriously can’t see anything because of the way the building is designed. It looks grand, and it is, but it is not spectator friendly. Unfortunately they were totally anal about photography both during the training and the barn tour, but Bee was able to snap this illegal photo under one arm during a break. I really can’t imagine having to train while wearing a wool coat with tails and white britches.
The barn tour was short but romantic, with the tack room arranged by someone apparently obsessive-compulsive slash hypochondriac, and the horses all neatly bedded down in mounds of shavings and surrounded by the brass post and rails decorating the bars around their stalls. Most notably, there was one brown horse in the sea of gray (white) horses. Lipizzaners are born black and gradually turn gray as they age. You’ll notice that I don’t say “white.” This is because in horse technical terms, there is no such thing as a “white” horse. A true white horse would be an albino, and those are rare. All horses, even if they look white, are gray. There are varying shades of gray. In the photo above, the horse on the far left of the photo is what’s called “dapple-gray.” Dapple-gray horses will always fade as they age. This is a good way of telling whether a horse is young or old. For example, I can tell you that the horse in the center of the photo is the oldest, since he’s the lightest gray out of all the horses there. We asked about the brown horse in the barn and were told that brown (or rather, bay) is an acceptable color for the Lipizzaner breed, but not common. Horsey superstition insists that there always be at least one brown Lipizzaner in a Lipizzaner barn at all times, to prevent accidents. By “accidents” I’m assuming they mean having to call the ambulance or the vet, since one of the riders did hit the dirt during the earlier training session. He didn’t get hurt, however, so maybe brownie is doing his job.
I’m not overly sad that Vienna is not an option for my next riding career. After all, that still leaves Europe, Argentina, and Montana as possibilities. I’m more sad that all the guys in the Spanish Riding School turned out to be Napoleons!
The best part about traveling with Bee besides her being the only person who will put up with horse tourism is that she always manages to get me to go somewhere I would otherwise think too lame or girly to appeal to me. That’s right, Bee has a few girlier tendencies than me, though she’ll never admit that to you if you ask her. “We’re going to the Schmetterlinghaus,” she said determinedly, after reading about it on a Vienna tourist map. “Ok,” I said, without question. Bee usually doesn’t make solid decisions in my presence, so when she does, I know only to answer in the affirmative. Schmetterling is German for “butterfly,” and that’s what this was - a giant greenhouse filled with tropical plants and annoyingly elusive butterflies. It really was a tropical paradise. So tropical, in fact, that within thirty seconds of entering, you were smearing the sweat around on your face with your shirt sleeve. The butterflies seemed to come in two varieties. Those that would let your camera lens get so close you nearly smushed them, and those that flew away when you were fifty feet away trying mightily to be quiet while you approached.
These giant blue ones were impossible to photograph, and Bee took the only successful photo of one that day.
Then again, there was the one that landed right by us and mysteriously made no attempts to fly away as some visiting idiot virtually finger raped it trying to get it to open its wings so he could photograph it. Gads, people are dumb.
I will readily admit to Bee and the world that the Schmetterlinghaus was pretty darn cool, and that everyone should try and drop by if you’re ever in Vienna.
Other things I suggest? The Uhrenmuseum (clock museum) was amazing. And no, all the clocks are not set to the correct time as the popular fable goes (can you imagine having to change all these clocks for daylight savings, or hearing them all go off at noon?), and I don’t think all of them are even working. Regardless, this is a seriously huge collection of timepieces. They even have “Die kleinste Pendeluhr der Welt,” or the tiniest pendulum clock in the world, sitting next to a thimble.
Bee always manages to surprise me when I least expect it. I suppose that’s the definition of “surprise,” right, but there are things she does that are unexpected but not eyebrow-raising, and then there are things she does that make you go, “And where, pray tell, did that come from?” At the end of our Vienna trip, she said, “Let’s go to that amusement park,” and pointed to it on her map. This is funny in that Bee refuses to ride any of the roller coasters, deeming them too scary. She will, however, gladly ride anything that involves violence or possible injury to others, which is a little known fact about Bee that I am now exposing to the entire world. I suspect this is probably why she plays polo, and why (to my utter disbelief) she decided to try hockey, but she always keeps her dangerous tendencies in check just enough to cause me to look at her out of the corner of my eye every so often.
Bumper cars usually aren’t dangerous. At least, in the U.S. where you’re not allowed to hit anyone and everyone has to drive in the same direction so that the park doesn’t get sued, they’re not dangerous. Even after 7.5 months in Europe, I consistently forget that people here are responsible for their own actions. As such, you can mostly do whatever the hell you want, including standing up in a bumper car or jumping in or out while it’s moving or not even bothering to wear your seatbelt so that when Bee sneaks up on you from the left and rams into your car at full speed, you practically go flying out onto the metal floor of the ride. You’d be surprised at how many times she was able to do this when there isn’t even anywhere to hide. She sort of scares me a bit in these situations, but I figure that after all these years of my various antics I’ve been asking for it, so I buck up and try to get her back, though never quite as well.
The Vienna Prater amusement park is an old skool, half post war, carnie trash games and rides park dotted with more modern vomit-in-your-lap, spend-ten-minutes-upside-down type thrills, all enjoyable within the flexible European guidelines of “If you kill yourself, it’s your own damn fault.” The best part about the €3 or so that we spent on the bumper cars was that the ride went on until you either wanted to jump out on your own to prevent your concussion from getting worse or you puked in your own lap. When either of these things happen, you can’t say you didn’t get your money’s worth.
The entire Vienna gallery is here.
