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Vienna, AustriaMar 15, 2009
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Outside Schonbrunn Palace
Schonbrunn Palace...in the Habsburg dynasty
The outdoor gardens at the palace
| We got to Vienna without any major problems. We checked into our hostel which was so clean and was more of a hotel. It was almost a place I could see myself staying with my family. After we were settled we went into the old town section of Vienna to see if we could get into the Opera. Each night they have standing room tickets you can get after the opera's started, but by the time we got there it was almost over and all the tickets were sold out. We still got to walk around the hall so it was worth going out. We had a classy McDonald's dinner and then went back to where we were staying to get ready for bed. We only had one full day in Vienna and had a lot planned for it! Around 10am we were on our way to the Schonbrunn Palace, which was used by the Hapsburgs. It reminded me of Versailles because it was about 20 minutes outside the city and had gorgeous gardens out back. The tour of the palace was really good, it had a lot of history about Maria Theresa and Marie Antoinette who I didn't even know was part of the Hapsburg dynasty until our visit. The gardens were really nice walking around but you could tell it's a lot more scenic in the spring/summer with all of the flowers. Just another reason I'll have to come back to Europe! When we were done looking around the palace we took the metro back to the old town section of town and did the Rick Steve's self guided walking tour...we definitely get good use out of all of his books! We walked past the Opera House again, and then went to the Hotel Sacher which has the Sacher Cafe and famous Sachertorte. The Sachertorte is this really chocolatey cake that is really well known all over Europe. We didn't time it well and that just ended up being our lunch haha so healthy. It was very rich and we weren't that hungry for awhile after. We saw the Spanish Riding School, St. Peter's Church, St. Stephen's Cathedral, and the Hapsburg Royal Apartments. There were a lot of cute buildings, so now I understand why people who have visited Vienna talk about how romantic it is. Outside St. Stephen's there were some street dancers so we stopped and watched for a bit. Afterwards Sarah, Katherine and Whitney went on a tour of the Royal Apartments but I decided to walk around the city on my own. I didn't feel like going through another guided tour and wanted to explore as much of Vienna as I could for only having the day. We met up around 5:15pm, and got our bags from the hostel before making it to the train station. The train ride was our adventure for the day. Our seats were in a 6-person room, and we were lucky to get a room to ourselves. The four of us were able to sprawl out and blast our music without annoying anyone around us. All of a sudden these 3 guys walk past our cabin and try to get in. Katherine and Sarah were holding the door shut with all their might which still wasn't enough to keep these creepers away. The three burst in and were obviously drunk, they had this huge 2 liter wine bottle and kept offering it to us (what girl would take a drink from that?!). They kept coming by, we couldn't stop cracking up but then it started to get a little annoying. Since we were laughing they weren't taking our "please go aways" seriously. The Czech guys said they wanted to hang out with us because we were "interesting American girls", so we told them we were all going on a spa trip our boyfriends planned. This finally worked because 10 minutes later the guys came back and one of them goes "so, we've been talking and decided you girls are STUPID. 4 stupid American girls". Hahah we couldn't stop laughing at their attempt to offend us, but I guess I can't really dish out anything in Czech. At least we got the guys to leave us alone and be able to find our hostel in Prague without worrying about these weirdos following us. |
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