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Published: March 11th 2011
At the beginning of my fifth week away from home, I left Salzburg to travel to Vienna. Getting up early to leave the hostel, I was walking to the train station whilst it was snowing. I don't know if I will ever get over the excitement at snow, hopefully I do, because I still tend to act quite like an excited child. I struggled on the train trip, which was about five hours long, as I was beginning to get sick. It is always the way, I never get sick when I am working, only when I am on holidays! Austria is a very religious country and still observes Sundays as being a holy day, therefore when I arrived in Vienna on Sunday afternoon there was very little to do. This suited me fine, I kicked back in the hostel and had a rather lazy afternoon – quite nice after being on the go for quite some time now.
The following morning I dragged myself out of bed, my head was hurting and I had had a terrible nights sleep because I kept waking in pain. I decided I needed to do something about it, so I found the spare
bottle of malaria tablets in my pack and started taking them again – they are an antibiotic after all, and I decided any type of antibiotic would surely help me recover. That day I planned to visit the Schonbrunn Palace, which is the Summer Palace of the royal family. I caught a tram out to the palace and decided to buy a Winter Pass ticket which gave me access to the grand tour of the palace (via audio guide), the zoo in the gardens which is apparently the oldest zoo in Europe, the Palmhouse and the Desert House (both of which I had no idea what they were, but hey, they were included in the pass). The palace is beautiful, with so many grand rooms open for public viewing and the audio guide giving some really good information. After viewing the palace, I walked out into the massive gardens in search of the zoo. The zoo ended up being the highlight of the day. The weather was simply gorgeous which made for a nice change – about 4 degrees with a beautiful blue sky and lots of warmth from the sun when you were in it. The zoo is quite
large with great interactive displays – you end up being quite close to the animals in some sections of the zoo. I took a huge number of photos there simply because there was so much to see and do.
After a lovely lunch in one of the cafes at the zoo that overlook the orangutans I walked over to the Palmhouse which was a great big hot house full of beautiful flowers, plam trees etc. It was very peaceful to walk around and they had made some great little seating areas through out for people to sit and enjoy – which is exactly what I did for some time. The desert house was similar however with desert flora and fauna on display. I ended up spending my entire day at the Palace and had a really great time.
Although Vienna is a pretty city, I wasn't really taken by it. In reflection of my last two weeks in Europe, I realised that those cities that I've really enjoyed (Frankfurt, Bern, Luzerne, and Salzburg) have definitely been because of the ambience and the charm that they possess. I was happy with my decision to stay only two nights in Vienna
with the next stop being Prague!
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