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Esperanto Museum, Vienna — October 2006
The Esperantomuseum is downstairs from the globe museum, in the same freaking building, so I couldn't really pass up the chance to visit. It's super tiny; just two small-ish rooms, but it was still really interesting, in an extremely nerdy sort of way.
I'm pretty sure this must be the second international Esperanto conference, in Geneva, 1906. Look at me, I can read Esperanto, I'm some kind of genius! Anyway, I believe, at the time this photo was taken, the guests from the previous year's international Esperanto conference were still recovering from the wedgies they received from the Popular Kids and Bullies conference that happened to be in the same hotel.
These books are probably something important! You'll notice I don't have much to say about most of this Esperanto stuff. I wish I'd remembered to take a picture of one of the only interactive (and very sad) features they had there, which was, no lie, a Pac-Man ripoff arcade game that periodically makes you answer questions about Esperanto grammar.
Talk (Esperanto) to the hand.
You can add Esperanto to the list of languages in which I know how to say the the most important word, "chocolate." That makes about a dozen.
Posters advertising (left) tutus for bowling balls, (middle) holy grails, and (right) shivs.
By the looks of that cowboy font, I'd say that one of the left is an ad for a steakhouse.
Whoa, I had no idea there were commercial products with labels in Esperanto! That's... very strange! I don't really have any other insight about that!
Haha, oh man, okay, so I vaguely remembered reading something on the sign out front about how this was a museum of "Esperanto and other invented languages," and then suddenly I found myself in front of this computer with headphones attached so you could listen to Shakespeare read in a bunch of languages nobody ever heard of, most of which were old and scholarly and created for some noble purpose or other, and one of which was Klingon. I was listening to Klingon as I snapped this photo, no lie.
Whew, okay, that's enough Esperanto for a lifetime. Soon after this, I was on an overnight train bound for Transylvania...
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