I have previously mentioned the cafeteria that we eat in most days, originally built as a 'house' for the Princess of the Emporer who lived in Schloss Laxenburg (my office building). This building has the same architectural style of high ceilings, chandeliers and artwork galore. I thought I would share with you some snapshots from our not so humble 'food court'.Warning: There Be Lions. Munich had them and I seem to be noticing them
around Vienna and Laxenburg, lots of statues of lions. Its not only in Africa...The photo on the right shows the Oval Room, the main dining area (there are many small rooms within the Schloss Restaurant).
This could be mistaken for a piece of art on the wall but is in fact part of the scene from the ceiling.
The next shows the meeting room complete with mirror topped table. Some of the YSSPers booked it for a lunch meeting. It felt very wrong to eat off plastic trays in such a fancy room. They even put fresh roses on the table for us that day.
Finally a photo at dusk over the back garden of the Schloss Restaurant. The yellow building positively glows as the rays of the sun disappear behind the clouds.
1 comment:
The Wikipedia article on lions is actually pretty interesting. "Until the late Pleistocene, about 10,000 years ago, the lion was the most widespread large land mammal after humans. They were found in most of Africa, much of Eurasia from western Europe to India, and in the Americas from the Yukon to Peru." So they were culturally significant in many places where they are no longer present, and the legends of them continued after they went locally extinct. There was also some contact between Africa and Europe, of course, even in ancient times, and lions got transported sometimes. One example from another web page: "Animals, including lions, actually were kept at the Tower of London for many centuries. The tradition of keeping animals there began in the 13th century, when Emperor Frederic II sent three leopards to King Henry III. In subsequent years, elephants, lions, and even a polar bear were added to the collection. The polar bear was trained to catch fish in the Thames." Lions were also known to the ancient Greeks, for example (http://www.pothos.org/content/index.php?page=lions).
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