Long-delayed update! (Part 1)

Sorry for the massive delay! I'm back, though, and here to catch you up on the past week or two of my life.

So let's see...when last we left, it was just before Vienna began experiencing torrential rains on a pretty regular basis. This was particulary true on the evening of the farewell dinner for the head of the Media and Outreach section here at Public Information. These are all views from the restaurant at the Kopa Kagrana (yes, at the Kopa...Kopa Kagrana!) where the dinner was held:






Luckily, as you can see below, our restaurant was outfitted with all the necessities of a seafaring vessel, so we were okay.

The dinner was a lot of fun, as was the final farewell breakfast that Friday. I'm sorry to see our director go - she was a very friendly person and I didn't have much time to get to work with her.

Friday evening, though, my friend Mike (also in Austria) managed to get cheap tickets to the Staatsoper's production of Aida Hi Mike!

It was great timing, because the Staatsoper is actually closed in July and August, so this was one of the last days that an opera would actually be going. The ticket was also only marginally more expensive than the cheap standing-room tickets, but we had actual chairs. Amazing! They also had individual screens with subtitles (supertitles? titles that don't have any prefix because depending on your placement in the theater they have different spatial relations to the stage?) in either German or English, as seen here:

(Figure 3 - titles)

Here's a view of the actual theater

Below, I've included photos I took of some of the AMAZING sets that the theater put up. I was not only impressed by the sheer size of the staging, but how quickly they managed to get the sets changed between scenes - pays to have huge wings, I guess.

The temple of Vulcan

Egyptian Palace

Celebration at the Ethiopians' defeat

Temple of Isis...I couldn't take my eyes off that head the entire scene

Temple of Justice

SPOILER ALERT!

Radames' Cell / Tomb

Curtain call! All the Principals with the conductor

And finally, for your perusal, here are a few photos from inside the building.

Me on the balcony

Outdoor balcony overlooking the square - you could preorder intermission refreshments.

Outside view by night

Paintings on the inside

Hometown hero!

Anyways, that's all I'm going to put in this update - I don't want to overload one post with photos, as they take a while to load, and as I seem to have reached some single-post limit since I'm not managing to upload any more photos...I'll try again later.

The long-delayed update shall continue in part two!