European Escapade 6: Schnitzel & Mozart!

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Vienna, Austria: August 8th - August 10th

Our arrival in Vienna in the evening was pretty straightforward & we even scored a free map to the city at the train station. We made it to our hostel which was nearby - a new university halls of residence, being rented out to the public over the summer break. It was a huge place with hundreds of rooms. On our arrival we were booked into a room on the second floor, but when we went in we immediately saw that someone else’s stuff was already in the room. When I went back downstairs to sort it out, the girl at reception told me it was impossible, as the previous people had booked out already. I told her to come & see for herself, which she did not, & instead gave us another room. We were very pleased with the standard of the rooms, & they were quite large for university accommodation, as well as having all kinds of shelving & desks for studying students during the year. We decided to grab a bite to eat from the station & then headed back to our room for an early-ish night, for the first time in our whole trip. Our feet were quite sore by this time, & it was nice to get some washing done & just relax without going out anywhere.


Day 15 - When we got up today & I had a look at the Lonely Planet guidebook I realised that I wasn’t sure what we would actually be interested in seeing in Vienna. We went into the city on the metro, as we decided to give our feet a break for a few days, even though it was probably only about 4km at the most into the city (we would usually walk this). We started off by visiting Stephensdom Cathedral (St Stephens Cathedral), which appeared to be the main attraction in the centre of town. We had a quick (free) look inside, which proved to be quite impressive, but after seeing some of the places we had recently been, it didn’t seem quite as fantastic. When we came outside we saw a whole pile of horses in their traditional gear, pulling old-fashioned carriages, & picking up tourists - you could hire them for a ride around the town - really nice! We walked down the main pedestrian streets & fought off about a hundred ‘Mozarts’ (people dressed as Mozart, selling tickets to performances of Mozart music), including one girl Mozart & one Mozart smoking a cigarette - quite a laugh! We made it to the Hofburg (Imperial Palace) owned by the Habsburg family, which was certainly far more impressive than the silly one in Munich - it was huge, & most of it was filled with several various museums & art galleries. We didn’t go inside but went for a walk through the grounds instead, wandering over to the Rathaus (clock tower), where there was an outdoor theatre set up, as well as a lot of outdoor stalls, where we had some more bratwurst for lunch (of course) - any excuse for sausages! We jumped on a city tram with a circular route & had a look around the city sites while resting our feet. When we finished doing that we headed across to a section of town called Hundertwasser, an art-nouveau area named after the guy who designed it. It was fantastic - the buildings were all these bright colours, & mixed kindly of oddly with the ‘normal’ looking buildings around them. There was a tiny mall with a couple of quirky art-nouveau shops, as well as the world’s most famous art-nouveau toilets (who knew?!) - it all seemed so colourful & funky. I really enjoyed looking around!

Once I had finished in the gift shops, admiring all the awesome photography of the area, we made it back into the central city & jumped on a tram to take into the outskirts, where we were going to visit a special cemetery, famous for the memorials to four of the great composers - Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert & Brahms. We arrived there & had a bit of a laugh as we jumped on a bus (yes, a bus) which took people all around the cemetery - once we started driving around we understood why the bus was there - the place was so incredibly massive! We didn’t find what we were looking for & were about to leave, when we saw a tour group entering the grounds, so we craftily tagged along (muahahaha!), knowing they would visited what we also wanted to see. They led us straight to the Beethoven monument - nice! I took some photos there, but unfortunately they were also on the digital camera - it was still cool to see a monument related to something so culturally & historically important.

We went back into town & it was getting quite late so we went for some dinner, first trying a place mentioned in Lonely Planet, which was closed for the summer (helpful!) & eventually making it to a local place in the centre of town. They did not have any menus in English but the staff were incredibly helpful, & we both enjoyed eating at a place that wasn’t full of tourists. We had some local food, which luckily for us, consisted of different types of schnitzels & salads, with potatoes - yum! Can’t complain about that! We headed back to the hostel for a bit of a rest - it had been quite a full-on day but we had seen quite a lot of Vienna in that time. There are certainly plenty of museums & art galleries to visit if you feel so inclined, although we didn’t really go to much of that kind of thing while we were there. Vienna has a real air of history about it.


Day 16 - Today we were departing for Prague (the Czech Republic) in the evening, so we had a bit of time to kill in the day. We headed off to Schloss Schonbrunn (the Habsburg’s 1440-room summer palace) on foot, which proved to be a bit further away than we had anticipated. It was still a good walk & we made it to the grounds in good time. We had heard that the grounds were massive & impeccable, & that you could look around a lot of the place without buying a full ticket to get in, as such. On arrival we were impressed with the size of the grounds & gardens that we saw, while casually looking for the maze that we had also heard about. On our wander we saw the entrance to the zoo & decided to go there instead - the Schonbrunn Zoo is the oldest zoo in the world, & is just a small fraction of the total property owned by the Habsburg family (to give you some idea of how extensive the grounds were!). We entered the zoo & stopped off first at the panda exhibit, as we had never seen pandas before - they were so cute - one was sleeping & the other was stuffing it’s face full of leaves, both right by the window where we could see them easily. When we came out we were suddenly surrounded by Chinese people who were on a promotional visit to visit the pandas, where they had been adopted from. We got lots of free bits & bobs that were being handed out, & some people even asked me to sign a big sheet (literally an actual bed sheet) for the panda visit, while someone took my photo - how embarrassing! It was so funny though, with all these wee Chinese people rushing around, & a few TV cameras around the place & stuff - it was obviously a big deal, but we got out of there to go & visit some of the other exhibits.

We followed a walking route through the zoo & managed to see almost all of the animals, I think. We got to see huge lions, tigers, polar bears (they were even swimming which was cool, as Vaughan had never seen any), elephants (always a favourite), & even the rare black leopard - we saw some up close as well, & they looked kind of odd, as you can still actually just see the leopard spots under their dark coat. We had awesome photos of all of them, except the black leopard, but unfortunately these were also on the digital camera. These were some of the photos I was most disappointed about losing, especially the ones of the elephants (where I got some awesome shots of a baby following it’s mother & having a dust bath), & also of the pandas, as they are uncommon to see. Never mind - we got some promotional photos of the pandas which we can scan (hopefully). The zoo itself was great - so clean & very modern. Some of the exhibits were fairly small, but it just seemed to be in excellent condition, as were the animals themselves. We saw all kinds of other things like timber wolves, meercats, brown bears, yellow-eyed penguins, seals (including a baby one), buffalo, crocodiles, giraffes, & all kinds of things. It was probably the best zoo I have ever visited - we had a great time out in the sun, just having a wander around. We spent so long there that we had to get back to pick up our stuff, have something to eat & get to the train station! We wandered back through the property, through some beautiful sculptured gardens, & out into the ‘backyard’ of the palace, to find a MASSIVE area filled with landscaped gardens, fountains, & of course tourists, that rose up a small hill & into the distance - so impressive!

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