When In Doubt, Mime!

Friday, 8/29
We had the day off from class today, and it was one of our classmate's birthday. We decided to sleep in and go to breakfast once everyone was ready. This type of planning should have been my red flag that it was going to be a long morning. Kelsey had gotten a recommendation from a friend about visiting Grinzing, a winery neighborhood in the north of Vienna. Combined with that tip and the Lonely Planet walking tour through the various winery neighborhoods, Kelsey and I were determined to spend our Friday checking out Vienna's wine gardens. With this plan in mind, we finally headed off to breakfast at a place called "The Breakfast Club" which apparently served the kind of breakfast we all missed. The restaurant had outdoor seating, but you could tell by the waitress' face that they did not normally have parties of 10. We flipped through the menus to figure out what we wanted, and were excited to see waffles and French toast! I ordered "Hell's Omlette" which the waitress described as being very spicy. I was pretty sure it wasn't going to be, based on my (almost) month-long experience in Vienna. When the omlette arrived, it was a simple egg and cheese combo with some red spices sprinkled on top. It wasn't bland, but it also wasn't very spicy. Everyone who got waffles were pleased to discover they were all heart-shaped and served with fresh fruit and syrup. We all enjoyed our breakfasts, but before we knew it, it was almost 1pm. The breakfast group wasn't moving very fast, but Kelsey and I were determined to get a move on so we could start our wine tour. In this case, we had to say goodbye to our classmates who were still poking around the restaurant, and bolt back to Simmering to pick up some more classmates who wanted to tag along. It was kind of chilly that day, so we were glad to get jeans and jackets on our pitstop home. Almost an hour and a half late to pick up our classmates, we found that they had (smartly) left without us. The wine tour had originally been planned to have a group going, but now it was down to just the two of us. We followed Lonely Planet's instructions to get to the starting place for the tour, but the bus we were on didn't go to the stop we were supposed to get off. We headed back the way the bus came until we found a bus schedule. Turns out the line we were on had different stops depending on what time you get on the bus, and we only had a 5 minute wait to get on the right one. The bus took us much further up the hill (the idea was to stop on all the wineries on the way down) and dropped us off at the church on the hill we visited on the second day in Vienna. Everyone was asleep at this point of our bus tour, so it is no wonder that we never pieced together where we were going. We wandered around the stop for awhile trying to figure out which way to go before we found the walking path. We headed down the steep, windy hill, hoping that we were on the right path. A bus labeled "Heurigen Tour" passed us, so we knew we must be close (heurigen is the German word for wine tavern). We reached a fork in the road that Lonely Planet told us to look out for, so we followed the directions. We found that it lead us to an incredibly steep hill, which we walked down, thanking God we weren't going in the uphill direction. We found the first wine garden on the tour, Hirt, but no one there seemed to speak English. We got our wine and sat at a table. The view was incredible, even if the wine was diluted with water. Some of the other customers were eating bread slices spread with a sun-dried tomato cheese spread, and we were getting hungry. Neither Kelsey or I knew how to ask for the dish in German, and we didn't have our phrasebooks handy. We thought of pointing at another customer's order if the waiter came by, but instead offered to each other to pay for the food if the other would go order it. I decided to brave the grumpy lady in the wine garden's store, and I knew the German word for bread. I ended up pointing to the cheese spread in the deli window, and miming putting the spread on bread. I got a huge eye roll, but when the lady grabbed the bread loaf and began slicing, I knew I was at least going to walk out the door with what I wanted. She gave me the bread with the cheese spread and I proudly walked out the door to our table. Kelsey and I laughed at having to resort to miming to get our food. We consulted our Lonely Planet guide to see where we were headed next, to realize that we had to walk back up the steep hill we had walked down. This was not an easy task in flip-flops! We finally made it to the second wine garden, and each ordered another white wine. The map of our tour made it seem like we had a long walk to the third garden, so we spent some time enjoying the second one. A long walk through a residential neighborhood and past the only Beethoven monument I spotted in Vienna, we found the third wine garden, and a couple from Toronto who had just arrived (and we found wandering the streets looking lost) joined us. Our next wine was also diluted with water, but when we finished we were approached by an older couple from Brooklyn who recognized our English. We chatted with them for a very long time (the wife ate her entire dinner as we chatted). As it was getting dark, we headed off to our last wine garden. Arriving at the location, we found the place to be closed. Lucky us, there was another wine garden next door. We drank more wine, found more Americans, and ordered more bread with cheese spread (which appeared to be the fare at wine gardens). Tipsy and ready to head home for our classmate's birthday outing, we jumped on the subway to get home. By the time we got back to the dorms, the group had already left. Since we have no cell phones and we had no idea where we were going, we decided to have our own night outing. Since our UN tour on Wednesday, I thought that the Danube would be a really cool place to check out. We got to the Danube to find the clubs open and blasting good music, but there were very few other people there. We walked around for awhile hoping to find the club where everyone was hiding, but we soon realized that there was really no one there. Disappointed that the place didn't live up to its potential, we called it a night and headed home.

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