Our last day in Vienna, we spent at the Imperial Palace, aka Hofburg Palace.  Hofburg Palace was the political center of the Habsburgs' monarchy. 

This was at the entrance.  The palace was again, too enormous for our cameras.


We did the Hofburg tour, which included a tour of the Habsburgs' silver collection (okay can I say that this was not very interesting to me?  I don't really care about silverware, even if emperors and empresses ate with them), a tour of the Imperial apartments, and the Sisi museum.  I knew I would like the Imperial apartments, since I love imagining how royalty lived.  I wasn't initially interested in the Sisi museum at all.  Empress Elisabeth was depicted as a somewhat vain and selfish woman during our tour of Schonbrunn Palace, so I didn't really care to see a whole museum dedicated to her.  But it was included in our tour, and I am very glad it was.  Poor Sisi.  The tour was every educational.  Empress Elisabeth, or Sisi, as she was known as, struggled with depression for much of her life after she married Franz Joseph.  The imperial life just wasn't for her, but she was trapped in it and could not get out.  Her journals revealed her despair and sadness for much of her life, and I left feeling very sad for this poor lovely woman.

In the afternoon, we went to see the Vienna Boys Choir.  This was a spectacular show:

And we caught some of the boys coming out of the concert hall after the show:

Aren't they just adorable!!

That night, we saw the famous Lipizaner horses at the Spanish Riding School.  This was cool because we had read a book from our SL Core 2 called White Stallion of Lipizza, and now we get to see these actual horses. 

This show was great, but unfortunately, A. has an allergy to horses!  Or at least to something in that show.  It is weird because she went to K's horse show earlier in the summer, where she was surrounded by horses and she didn't have any problems.  But about 5 minutes into this show, she began wheezing, coughing, tearing and finally broke out in hives.  F. and I took turns going outside with her, so we only got to see bits and pieces of the show.  Poor A. didn't see any of it.  Thank God she recovered within 10 minutes of leaving the show!  At any rate, the other children got to see all of the show and enjoyed it.  No photos of the horses were allowed, but we did manage to get a few shots in the lobby.  Just in case you were wondering, these were murals on the wall.  LOL