Curt took Griffin to work with him for part of the morning so that I could go on a short run. I ran to some neighborhood parks that I found on the map, but they were too small to provide a sufficient running surface to keep me off the streets. They were great for playing, though, so I took Griffin by there on the way back to the apartment. These little neighborhood parks are everywhere; the two that we visited were within 2 blocks of each other! Besides the copious amount of parks in Vienna, I also appreciate that the parks have plentiful seating for visitors.

Spinning disc

Another spinning activity!

Curt didn’t have to work past lunch today, so he was able to join us when we went back to Donauinsel to play at the water park where the water is pumped in from the Danube River. Today was a particularly warm day at 77 degrees, so it was a great day to go. There were a good amount of kids there when we arrived, but the numbers started thinning out after about an hour. Students in Vienna are still in school, so I was concerned that there wouldn’t be many kids there. Thankfully, Griffin had plenty of kids to play with!

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In addition to the waterpark on Donauinsel, the Danube River has several swimming areas. We walked across a bridge from Donauinsel to a beach area with swimming docks. We wanted to check out the river first, so we waded into an area by some rocks to see how quickly the depth changed. After a few minutes of surveying the area and realizing that the water wasn’t really all that cold, I decided that we needed to jump off the docks into the deep areas. Curt didn’t feel like jumping in and swimming today, so he was our photographer for most of the time. I did commandeer the camera at one point when he was wading in the water with Griffin to snap some pictures of them and ended up getting some closeups of a swan.

The bridge is a road on top and the UBahn train runs underneath the road across the water.

In the background, there is an area on Donauinsel called Sunken City. There are restauarants and bars in the middle of sandpits. It is supposed to look like a beach, but looks more like giant sandboxes. The beach theme is actually popular here. We passed another large open bar area in the city the other day that was a large sand pit with tables and music.

Curt nabbed this closeup when the swan come up to the edge of the river.

We could have stayed longer to enjoy the river, but we had to run by the grocery store before it closed at 8:00 pm. We were also missing part of our laundry time at the apartment building. This is the first apartment that we’ve stayed at for study abroad that did not include a washing machine. We can only use the washer and dryer in the cellar during our designated hours. We have a few hours on Sundays and another few hours on Wednesdays. Since we will be traveling back into Vienna from weekend trips for the next couple of Sundays, it looks like Wednesday nights we’ll have to stay close to “home” to do laundry. The whole process is interesting…and a little annoying. You have to put a Euro coin in the machine on the wall to turn on the power for the machines in one hour increments. Once you start the machine, you can’t open it until the cycle is finished, which is about 45 minutes for the washer.You definitely have to make sure you stay on top of the time because if you do not get your laundry out of the machine before your hour is up, the power goes off and you have to put in another Euro to get them out! We usually don’t have a dryer when we are traveling in Europe, so we do appreciate that aspect. Unfortunately, the clothes come out of the dryer extremely wrinkled and we do not have an iron! We should probably invest in a European travel iron. We have a European travel hair dryer that we bought during our first trip to Florence in 2008 and it is still going strong.