Vienna, Day 2

Day two was full of walking in the frigid cold, and museums. I love museums, and my computer is currently choking on the hundreds of pictures I took in the Kunsthistorisches (Art, but we really only did the antiquities wing this time) and Heeresgeschichtliches (military history!) museum. Most of the pictures are terrible and covered with glare, so don't get too excited. In fact, I really don't have time to go through and identify all the important ones, so those detailed blog posts (on wonderfully drool-worthy delicious uniforms... covered with glare) will have to wait. For now, here is the quick run-down of the day. We started walking. Hilarious things we passed included a Rock Pub! I don't know why this is so entertaining, but it is indeed.

 We walked by this sign, which of course made me think of my friend Adrian the Maya Archaeologist.

We walked by a cake decorating shop, and the word "zucherblumen" was greatly entertaining.

"Intensive kinder mamma-baby" sounded like something crazy, but then we decided they were different types of available yoga classes.

The art museum was very grand indeed.

It has a lot of neat Egyptain stuff, but the best were the animal mummies. My favorite was the giant crocodile and baby crocodiles, but Julia really liked the monkey-in-a-monkey.

 

 

There was too much amazing art for my pictures to do it any justice. So I'll just show you my collection of ancient Greek croquet pictures. I'm sure those aren't really croquet mallets, but I had a surprising amount of fun pretending they were!

 

 

I promise pictures of uniforms later... really. Here is a really cool plane for now.

Croquet Rules

Another reason that 19th century croquet is much more elegant and wonderful than modern croquet (other than the superior croquet set proportions) is that the game was played differently. Modern croquet, to the best of my knowledge, is played only as an individual. The goal of the game is to get through the wickets and finish before anyone else, and you can croquet any other player out of the way to accomplish this. For anyone who doesn't know - if you hit your ball, and it touches another, you have the opportunity to put your ball next to theirs, put your foot on your ball and hit it. The force travels through your foot-stabalized ball, into the opponent ball, which then goes rolling away. That is a really easy thing to understand in person, but surprisingly difficult to describe verbally.

Anyway, in the 19th century, croquet is played in teams. I feel like this adds a great deal of interest to the game. Some balls you want to croquet away from their goal, but you also want to help the people who are on your team. This sounds much more civilized to me. Also, sometimes you will go through the final wicket. At this point, you could stake-out, finishing the game. If you play as an individual, this is worth doing, because you win. But if you are playing on a team, you can become a "rover" and go around croqueting balls - helping teammates and hurting the opponent team. After all, you can't win until all members of your team stake out.

Doesn't that just sound like a more friendly game? Much more civilized.

Croquet Sets

If you have ever seen a modern croquet set, you might have noticed how different the one from yesterday's post looked. Here is a modern set:I couldn't find a good picture of someone playing with a modern set, to give you a better sense of the proportions. Basically, the head of the mallet is massively long (what I see is usually about a foot long), where our set was less that half that. The handle, however, is significantly shorter on a modern set, causing people to bend over inelegantly when playing. In my opinion, this is really hideous.

The set we used was a wedding gift to my parents, from a family friend that made the set. It is made to specifications in nineteenth century croquet manuals. When you play with this set, you don't have to stoop over awkwardly to make contact with the ball.
So if you have ever felt inelegant when playing croquet, now you know why. Short, ugly mallets with big, ugly heads will make anyone look silly. Unless you are cool enough to be a Heather, I guess...

Pine Cone Croquet

Yesterday I went into Harvard Square to drink tea and play croquet, and mostly to look lovely. I wore my fantastic ruffled lilac/white stripe skirt with a train. A friend of mine, back on break from college, made a lovely white trained skirt to wear (really beautiful fabric - it looked lovely) and Mother dug through the closets to help outfit a friend of hers. So here we are, looking lovely with our croquet set.Unfortunately, given how sunny it was and the fact that we are all wearing hats, I have no good pictures of our faces. I mean, certainly not my face. But this looks quite lovely, I think. When we opened the bag with the croquet set, we discovered that there were no wickets! Oops! But we were determined to play, so we improvised... Pine Cone Croquet! Where the object of the game is to hit the pine cone clusters in order. In the final analysis, this is MUCH easier to play than real croquet, because the direction you hit the cones from doesn't matter. The game went very quickly, even though we were all very out of practice, and even despite the divot next to one of our pine cone piles.
I wanted to get a good picture of my skirt in all its half-finished ruffly glory, but none of the pictures really capture how wonderful it is. But here is an entertaining picture of mother's shadow! (I bet it would be a fine picture of me if I were clever enough to crop things, but I am not)