Vienna

Hello from another beautiful city! Vienna has to be our favourite place so far! The people are nice, the streets are nice and the schnitzel is nice. Knowing what we know now, we both agree we would have liked more than 3 days here, so I'm sure we'll be back!

Day 1: We came in at about 6:30 in the morning from Prague and were very tired from the night train. We lucked out at the hostel because they had beds ready so we took a nap. We also found out today and tomorrow were holidays. Holidays are great if you get them off work, but we've hit so many holidays on this trip where you can't even get groceries, so that sucked. When we got up we wanted to do a walking tour but of course, because of the stupid holiday, there was none....so we did our own. We looked up a self directed walking tour online, took a screen shot with all the numbers marked on a map and off we went. There was only one problem: because we just had a map with numbers, we had no idea what we were suppose to be looking for or seeing at each number. It turned into quite the entertaining scavenger hunt afternoon. We saw a statue around number 2 and thought "Oh look at that man. He looks important right? This has to be number 2" when it was the massive gardens around the corner. We did see St. Stephen's Cathedral, Mozart's apartment and some sculpture thanking the gods for not killing the entire population with the plague so we could probably make our own tour company after this successful walk. We had a coffee and a piece of cake (the famous Sacher torte) at a cafe right across from St. Stephen's Cathedral (where Mozart got married) which made for some good people watching. We saw the town hall afterwards which had a bunch of cranes in front of it taking down the Eurovision stage. We had no idea what Eurovision was but people made sure we learnt. It's basically American Idol where each country only has one performer competing. Apparently Australia was the wild card entry and apparently this was important. Apparently Sweden won and apparently everyone booed Russia. Needless to say I'm glad we missed it as it seemed like the city was crowded. We went to a Austrian restaurant after where Jordon finally got his real wiener schnitzel. Most places make there schnitzel out of pork so finding the veal was difficult, but worth it. We weren't ready to go back to the hostel yet so we went to an Australian bar (yes, you read that right). I think because people mix up Austria and Australia a lot places decided to cash in on that mistake. We did end up meeting Australians AND Austrians there and had quite a few drinks....Jordon maybe had a few more than I did but I was able to get him home safely.

Day 2: we only had one thing on our agenda today: the opera. The opera house in Vienna is one of the most famous and you could see a show for only 3 Euros per person. Unfortunately for us, tonight's show was 5 hours long and the reason the tickets are so cheap are because you're standing. The opera was called Götterdämmerung. It was the last of 4 operas about a ring with a curse. It was all in German but they had a little screen where it translated it to English. We got in line at about 1:00 for our tickets and were able to buy them at 2:30. Then we stood in another line to get into the gallery. After 2 1/2 hours we were finally standing at a railing where you had to tie a scarf to save your spot (it's quite the process). The show finally started and the sound was amazing. I didn't need an opera as I would have been happy just with the symphony. About an hour into the show I started to get really hot. I had to sit down on the little step behind me because I felt like I was going to faint. Oh hello dehydration. I had to get out of there and get some water. One thing you don't want to do is run to the bathroom and start drinking and slurping from the sink in an opera house where people in there have more money on their fingers than you have in your band account.... I didn't care. I must have stood there for a good 20 minutes getting fluids back into me. I had to wait for the next intermission to go back in but they had a TV I could watch it on. Somehow we survived the next three hours, though our feet were sore and our stomachs were growly. We walked to a Thai restaurant as we wanted to eat something a bit different and it was delicious. We called it a night after that.

Day 3: Things were finally open today! The main thing we were excited about was the Naschmarkt right across from our hostel. It had a ton of booths and restaurants but we knew we couldn't make a full day of it so we tried to find something else to do. When Jordon was reading off all the different museums, nothing really interested me. And then he said the most amazing thing, words that I never thought I'd hear but reminded me how amazing of a man he is and how lucky I am. "....or we could go to the zoo?" I was so excited. It was an incredible zoo too! They had pandas, aquariums and more than one elephant, which is a big deal to us Edmontonians. There was one part that was terrifying though: we were walking through this beautiful tropical pavilion with birds and fish and plants and bats. Bats that weren't in a cage. Bats that when you pushed the plastic out of the way were flying everywhere. They wanted you to walk across a bridge in a cave like thing with HUNDREDS of bats flapping around like some stupid Mario Kart level! We tried. We must have tried to open the plastic curtains ten times before I'd jump back. In the end we didn't walk through there. Austrians have a sick sense of humour. We lucked out with the location of the zoo because we were able to see the palace on our walk back home. Once we got back to the Naschmarkt, we found a Turkish restaurant that served up some tasty falafel. Our hostel had a really cheap bar that we went to after were we met up with some girls from Australia/London who we'd met earlier. They ended up being teachers as well who had done the move to the UK for work so I was able to pick their brains a bit and set up a drinking group if we move. After a couple drinks we headed back up to get a good night sleep.

We're on our way to Salzberg now which I hope is just as beautiful as Vienna but a bit warmer.

- Vanessa xo