No Kangaroos

Alrighty then… Sorry it's taken me so long to get this up. Rome was so busy that I never really got the chance to write. But, I'm in Lyon now, classes have started, and I have the time to write again.

Ok, Vienna. Vienna was a planned trip, but the length of the trip was not. Like I said in PROST!, we cancelled the Prague trip (though I've heard we shouldn't have) and we spent an extra day in Munich and two extra days in Vienna.

So, we left Easy Palace (which I highly recommend. Having stayed in 2 other cities, 4 including Paris and London in 2006, Easy Palace has been my best stay anywhere so far.) But back on topic. We left Easy Palace and got on our train to Vienna about 9:30. Other than the beautiful scenery as we made our way through the mountains, the train ride was completely uneventful. I wrote about Munich, Brad played video games, and the girls slept. About 1:40, we pulled into the Westbahnhof train station in Vienna. From there, we bought 3 day passes for the subway and bus system, which turned out to be completely unnecessary. Just as a side note, our passes were never checked. I was baffled by this. You'd never see it in America. They seemed to operate completely on the honor system. No gates, no attendants. But again, I'm off topic. We took the subway to the last stop on its route, the Ottakring station. Then we hopped a bus to its last stop, finally arriving at Palace Hostel - Schlossherberge. Yeh, we were WAY out there.

The bus stopped at this HUGE hotel on the top of a hill. "Hell of a hostel!" I thought. But, our hostel was on the side of the hotel. It wasn't anything special, but it was clean and that's all that mattered. We had a 4 person room to ourselves with 2 sets of bunk-beds. The guys got the top bunks.

After unloading our luggage, we went outside to take pictures of the city. What the hostel lacked in "extras," it made up for with its view. You could see the entire city and all of the mountains that surrounded it. It was a hell of a view! After snapping a few pictures, and figuratively catching our breath, we made our way back to the bus and subway to go to City Center. The trip didn't seem that long, but I later timed it, and it took about 35 minutes (20 on the bus) to get to the center of the city.

When you get off at Stephansplatz (Stephen's plaza), you emerge into what is called city center. In this instance, you come up the escalator, step out into the sunlight, and are greeted with a huge gothic style church; St. Stephen's Cathedral in the heart of Stephansplatz. The church was gigantic. Even with my smallest lens, I couldn't capture the entire thing. Huge spires shot into the air. And the steeple was so large, it was the one thing that was clearly visible, day or night, from our view at the hostel. The roof was weird. It was a multicolored tile roof with pictures made from the tiles.

We snapped a few pictures, but were mainly interested in finding lunch. Laugh if you will (and you will), but Vienna had my favorite food of the trip. They had a € 3 hot dog stand! And when I say hotdog, picture a pig-in-a-blanket using French bread and a foot-long bratwurst. They called it "spicy." I was warned about it every time I ordered, but I wouldn't call it hot or spicy. It was well seasoned, and it was delicious. I ate there all three days. After that, we got gelato (ice cream). Of the three cities I've tried it in, Vienna had the best gelato, hands down. It was actually pretty funny how popular it was. They literally had gelato restaurants everywhere. And they were all packed. All of them. The churches and museums had signs up that specifically forbade gelato. (No food! No gelato! - Apparently they're not the same thing over here.)

Anyway, after that, it was time to see the city. We had gotten a self-guided walking tour map from the hostel before we left. It highlighted 13 different sites within a reasonable walking distance of each other. We started back at St. Stephen's (#2 on the map) and made our way to St. Peter's Church, Michaelerplatz, the Hofburg Imperial Palace, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The girls got tired of the tour after the Imperial Palace and decided they wanted to do something else. So, we walked to the opera house to see about getting tickets for the Sunday night show. They told us tickets would be available Sunday, and we needed to get there 2-3 hours in advance if we wanted to guarantee we got tickets. (We decided we didn't want to go that badly.)

From there, we went to an amusement park Brad and Kierstyn read about in one of their travel books. When we got there, we were expecting a 6-flags type park where you paid upfront and got to ride everything. Instead it was more like a carnival. They had big rides, but you paid for them individually. So I rode this one ride, that was a BLAST! I still don't know what it was, but it was one of the better rides that I've ever been on.

After that, we went up on a ferris wheel, and got to see the city and the mountains at sunset. Vienna really is a pretty city. After that, we went back to the hostel for the rest of the night. The others got alcohol at a little store and sat on the hill drinking. I wrote for a while and then went out and met them.

Sunday, everybody was pretty much exhausted from the traveling and crazy sleep schedules, so we slept late. Then we split up for the day. The girls went and did their thing, and Brad and I went back to Stephansplatz, grabbed some lunch and gelato, and finally made our way to the imperial palace for the arms and armory tour. That was pretty cool. They had a bunch of old armor, old bows and arrows, swords, guns, etc. It was raining outside, so it worked out well that we were inside for the day.

Then we went on the treasury tour. Now, THAT was cool. It's absolutely ridiculous how extravagant some, or should I say, most of that crap was. The Bible talks about how hard it is for a rich man to get into heaven, and I think this is what He meant by "rich." The treasures inside of here were unbelievable. The hand-crafted intricacies, the gold, & the jewels of the crowns, the scepters (or whatever you call them), and the various other things in there was unbelievable. And all of it, strictly for decoration and showing off. Still, I'm glad I saw it.

But the best part of Vienna for me was the relic room on the treasury tour. And by room, I mean like 5. The Hapsburgs were very Catholic, and they had a ton of relics. Two really stuck out. One was a piece of wood about a 2"x 8" encased in gold and other jewels, that was said to be from the cross of Jesus. The next one, and this one really hit home, was supposedly the nail that went in the right hand of Jesus. Now I don't know if they were real or not, and I don't know anybody that could validate their authenticity, but nevertheless, it was something to behold. The nail itself was a lot skinnier and longer than I imagined it would be. And to see it, and actually realize the pain that thing must have caused, gave me chills. Seeing that alone was worth the trip to Vienna for me.

The two museums took about 3 hours total to see everything. We had a little bit of time left and it had stopped raining, so we finished the walking tour from Saturday, and then went meet the girls. Kierstyn had a friend from high school that lived in Vienna, so we headed to a place called Skybar to meet her. All the buildings in Vienna, with the exceptions of the major monuments and churches, are roughly the same size (about 7 or 8 stories). Skybar was on the 7th floor of one of the buildings near Stephensplatz. It had huge windows all around, but the only thing you really got to see was the tops of the other buildings.

Kierstyn's friend was late, so Brad and I left to try to find a bar with the LSU-Bama SEC Championship game on ESPN2. No luck. So we walked across one of the rivers to a not-as-nice part of town, walked a block, then turned around. As Brad described it, "This part of town isn't all cupcakes and gumballs." I don't know what that means. My understanding of Bama-babble is still very low. But we walked back to Stephensplatz and watched this guy do spray paint art.

I'd never seen this before, but there are a bunch of other youtube videos if you want to watch others. It was pretty cool to see in person.

By this time, it was just about dark, so we hopped the subway to take us back to our hostel, hoping we'd be able to catch the game on ESPN360, do some laundry, catch up on correspondence back home and just take it easy. Well, as luck would have it, their internet was down. They told us sometimes when the weather was bad they lose the internet. Well, we could see the stars outside, so I don't know what the real reason was. Regardless, we still took it easy. We put on music and played ping pong until late that night. (Brad killed me. There may be more to this GUMP theory than I originally realized).

The next day was a bit strange. We were leaving for Rome that night, which normally would mean checking out and going to the train station, but instead, we booked a night train. We still had to check out by 10:00, but we also didn't have anywhere to be until 7:00 that night. So we packed up, checked out of the room at 10:00, and finally left the room at 11:00. It was raining and cold outside this day. I literally could see my breath when I left the hostel. So we decided to stay put for a while. (The girls left.) Brad put on a load of laundry, and we went back to the ping pong room, where I quickly lost all the games again.

Round about 1:00, we loaded up our stuff and headed to Westbahnhof station. After losing € 8 to the locker machines, we finally found a security guard (whose only job seemed to be to take care of the problems with the lockers) who got everything straight for us. I forgot something at the hostel, so I headed back and Brad headed to city center. Round trip to get to Stephanplatz took me exactly an hour. I stopped by the hot dog stand again, then we went walk around the sketchy part of town again. We went to a random costume shop and a couple of other random stores before we figured we'd seen just about all we were going to see in Vienna. So we grabbed some more gelato and bid auf Wiedersehen to Vienna.

We got to Westbahnhof about 5:00 and found the girls already waiting in one of the lounge rooms around the station. (They had seen enough as well.) We watched the departure screens for a while, waiting to see which platform we would need to be on to leave. Well, our train never did show up. So we decided to look at the ticket. Wrong station. Luckily the correct station was only two metro stops away and we still had right at an hour before it was time to leave. I think when we got to the other station, we still had about 45 minutes to wait. Finally, the train arrived and we loaded up for I was hoping would be the best city in Europe. (It didn't disappoint.)

And that's Vienna.

It really was a beautiful city, but that's about all I can say for it. Great to see, but not much to do unless you're into museums and all that other stuff, which I'm not. The food was all I could ask for. It tasted great and kept me full. And, I will also say this for Vienna, (as I'm writing this two weeks late), Vienna had by far the prettiest women of any of the cities I've been to so far. Now that could be because this was the only city I was in on a weekend, and there were a bunch of tourists, but take it for what it's worth. If you get a chance to travel across Europe, sure, make a quick stop in Vienna. There are things worth seeing. But I probably won't be going back. If I make it back to Austria, I think I'll stick to the mountains. Nevertheless, I'm glad I got to see it!

Rome is next!!! auf Wiedersehen!!!

CLICK HERE for the rest of the pictures from my trip