Snowy Saturday

Once again, it had been snowing off and on for a few days without really doing much of any real accumulating, and then all of the sudden between Friday night and Saturday morning we have 6 inches of fresh snow.  My friend Jelena and I had planned to go exploring a bit on Saturday, so thankfully the snow just added to the scenery without messing up our plans.  

all good Saturdays begin with a bit of brunch...this time at a new (to us) cafe/patisserie...very yummy, and super cute...definitely going back. 

A few weeks ago we popped in to the Austrian National Library that is part of the Hofburg palace complex downtown, and decided we needed to go back sometime when we had time to pay the entrance fee and actually look around a while in the State Hall...Saturday was the day!

This part of the Library was built by Charles the 6th between 1723 and 1726 as his Court Library. 

The walls are lined with HUGE books.  It's hard to see scale here, but the books on the top shelf that look tiny are really "normal size".  This room holds 200,000 books printed between 1501 and 1850. 

A statue of Charles VI as "Hercules Musarum" 

Impressive marble guardians of books

These books are GIANT, they don't even fit on the huge shelves.

Spiral staircase up to the second floor

This door leads to a little storage room behind, and is not a miniature door...perhaps this helps a bit with scale.

There are several globes around the room, this one is from 1693 and was owned by Maria Theresia's husband, but has been on display in this room since the mid-18th century.

The fresco on the ceiling 

There are also several cases with extraordinary documents on display.  This is a segment of a Roman road map from the 12th century.

A botanical and pharmaceutical reference book from about 500 AD, which was restored in 1405

Very scholarly looking entrance to the State Hall. 

Wandering around town enjoying the snow...

Also. These signs are to indicate where there might be a "roof avalanche" (pretty much every street in the first district), and they aren't joking.  Yesterday the temperature was hovering just about at freezing, and this is pretty wet, heavy snow...so it was falling off buildings in giant chunks.  You'd hear this horrible crashing noise and everyone would look around to see what had just fallen.  We couldn't decide which was more dangerous, walking in the middle of the street dodging cars, or walking on sidewalks dodging avalanches.  Yikes.

So so beautiful though.  I do love this city in the snow.

I'm hoping for a few more fun activities around town and places close-by during these next couple weeks of break.  So far it's mostly been relaxing and catching up with friends I hadn't seen in a while, but there are still some more things on my to do list before this next semester starts!