Day Trip to Vienna, Austria!

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We had a really great day today in Vienna. Our bus left at 6am so I got up at 4am to catch the U Bahn so I could make it on time. Some of the people who went stayed out all night Friday drinking and partying and came straight to the bus. I don't know how they did it, because I couldn't tour a city drunk. The bus ride was 6 hours and we stopped halfway in a small town in the Alps. Our bus was a double decker and all of the students with us had the top section reserved. And since we drove next to the Alps all day we had an awesome view. The rest area we stopped at was really cool. It was a hotel with an awesome breakfast dining room with a panoramic view of the Alps out the windows while you eat.

I spent most of the bus trip figuring out what I wanted to see in Vienna. We had a tour of the city with the school, but it didn't cover anything and after the tour we had 4 hours of free time to see whatever extra things we wanted to. When we arrived, the thing I noticed first was the amazing architecture. I realized that Vienna is the first European capital city I've been to and of course the Austrians wanted it to look impressive because the King lived here. The architecture was absolutely beautiful and down every street was another huge monument. The first one we drove by was Karlskirche, a really beautiful church that looks like the Taj Mahal.

First we started our tour by walking down Kärtnerstraße, which was a really wide pedestrians-only zone. There seemed to be statues everywhere and on every building all throughout the Vienna Altstadt. We arrived at Stephansdom, one of the best known churches in Vienna. We went inside and then a group of climbed the South tower (the higher one) for a great view of all of Vienna. Of course, the stairway up was really tight and crowded, but that seems to be a normal trend in European towers. After that we walked through Graben and found a restaurant for lunch. It was a cool restaurant, hidden down an alley, and the stairs inside took us down underground. We had Wiener Schnitzel and talked for a while, then everyone met up again to continue the tour.

First, we walked to the University of Vienna, which after one in Prague is the oldest university in Europe. We kept walking along this street South and we walked by most of the most beautiful buildings in Vienna. Next was the Rathaus (city hall), which was also beautiful. It looked kind of like the Rathaus here in Munich, kind of like a church. Right across from that was another enormous, beautiful building, which was the city theater. I think walking through a city is definitely the best way to see as much as possible. You see so much more than if you just took the subway to each destination separately. Walking you see more of the people and other small things that most people don’t notice. The next buildling on our tour was one of the biggest ones in Vienna, the Parlament. This building was huge and I especially liked all the statues on top of the roof. There was also a huge multi-person statue in front of the building in a courtyard area.

The last stop on our city tour was Hofburg. Not only the the king of Austria lived here, but also the Emporers of the Holy Roman Empire worked and lived out of this huge palace. Now it houses the office of the president of Austria and a few museums. We came in at the Heldenplatz entrance, which is one of the best ones to see the palace from. After going under a multi-arch you arrive in a huge square with one big statue to the left and one to the right. We then walked through a door guarded by two Greek god statues (there were a lot more Greek style statues here) into a huge dome. To the left was a museum on Sissi, one of the queens of Austria, so some of us split up to see it. I found out we would have to wait there for them to finish so since it was getting late I decided to brave it on my own. We had free time for almost 4 more hours, but I didn’t want to get to all the sights too late to take pictures.

So I started off on my own. I had a map of all the places I wanted to see, but I had to choose which ones, because I didn’t have time for all of them. I decided to go up and see some of the things in the North part of the Altstadt that we missed before. I really wanted to see the Castle Schoenbrunn and the Zentral Friedhof (cemetery where Beethoven is buried), but I didn’t end up having time. Both were farther away and I would’ve had to take the S-Bahn and perhaps miss the meeting time for our bus home. We had to make it to the bus back to Munich on time or it would have to leave without us and we would have to buy really expensive train tickets back.

So I started walking from Hofburg’s Michaelerplatz towards a synagogue I wanted to see. It’s called Stadttempel and it’s the only synagogue in Vienna that escaped destruction during Kristallnacht during the Nazi occupation. I had read it would be hard to find…and it was. I never found it.
I wandered around a few different markets and other places too. The streets were all cobble stone and a lot of horse and buggy tours went all around the city. I went to the Hoher Markt, Judenplatz, Am Hof, and then Freyung with the Austrian Fountain. It was fun just walking around and seeing the squares and the architecture.

So since I had found everything on the North part of my list, I considered trying to go to one of the farther away sights that I wanted to see. As I was going into the U-Bahn to check the price of a ticket, I remembered that I hadn’t been to Karlskirche yet, which was near the meeting point for the return bus. So I decided to go see the church, then maybe get something to eat, and see the castle and the cemetery next time I’m in Vienna.

The Karlskirche reminded me a lot of the pictures I’ve seen of the Taj Mahal. There was even a pool of water in front too. As I was taking pictures the rest of my school showed up and we joined up again to see the Schloss Belvedere, which has a cool museum inside. On the way there we found a cool monument that was for all of the unidentified Russian soldiers who died in WWII.

Some of us decided we would rather eat before the 6 hour bus ride back, so Nicolas, Chun Peng, and I all went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. The Chinese food was the closest to legit Chinese food that I’ve had since I left China, I loved it.

After dinner we met the bus and came back to Munich. Luckily we had no problems the whole trip and we caught the bus back so I think the whole trip was a success.

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Photos

My day
Blue was with the school, red was by myself

Human Statues!
This is a cool thing in Europe we don't have in the US - People dress up in clothes or paint and stand still like statues and try to scare foreigners and tourists. It's fun!

Our cavern restaurant
There are a lot of problems when you're fightin in a basement. Number wuuuun bein, you're fightin in a basement!