Day 2 - Thursday 25th October 2012 - Vienna, Austria

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We woke up early today, at about 7.30, to have a shower and get ready for the day. Today we decided to go upstairs to our Executive lounge for breakfast, it wasn’t the most exciting of menu’s but it was nice to have a quiet area we could go and eat. Now that we could actually see outside as it was daylight, the view was soooo pretty. Breakfast wasn’t so exciting for me, I just had lots of rolls with nutella… I was happy… I did have a piece of cake too haha.

After breakfast we got ready to go to the zoo, we bought ourselves 48 hour train tickets as it worked out so much cheaper. I think it cost like €11.70, it’s was awesome having a little mini rail card… our personal ticket to the world that is Vienna. We took the U-Bahn U2 from Stadion to Schottenring where we changed and took the U4 to Hietzing where the Tiergarten Schönbrunn (Zoo) is.

While we were walking up to the ticket office we noticed they were doing combi tickets with the Viennese Giant Ferris Wheel (Wiener Riesenrad), it was only €18… we totally had to do it.

We started walking around the zoo, started at the Giant Pandas… they were being totally anti social, they had just been fed and they were all sitting with their backs to the window…. We moved on the red pandas next…. BEST ANIMAL EVER… they were being just as bad… sleeping and all that haha. We decided to leave them alone and pop back later, we carried on walking around the zoo, got to see the hippos, lions, tigers, penguins and sea lions. Cheetahs….. yep… Fiona got to see her cheetah… she was so sleeping and hidden in the corner but so cute. After looking at the penguins we decided to take a break and went and bought a Langos… OMG what is this… it was some random deep fried salty dough thing… I have no other words to explain what it was haha. It was weird!!! After the langos we decided to walk down the woodland trail to find the wolves… they were being just as lazy as the pandas and didn’t really get to see them… man the animals were being lazy today. There was a man there feeding the red squirrels and birds when suddenly this black squirrel started chasing me around… I ran around Fiona a few times and the next thing I knew this squirrel started to bounce up Fiona’s leg, it was hilarious. Soo cute.

We carried on walking around the zoo and decided to go back to see the cheetah and red pandas… oh my gosh!!!! It was feeding time at the red panda section… they were so lively and bouncy and fluffy and ADORABLE…. No words can express their cuteness.

Fiona decided it was time to drag me away from the cuteness to even more cuteness that was the gift shop…. Such a bad idea… we both bought adorable teddies of a red panda and cheetah. We had to escape before buying more things hehe.

Next we moved onto the Wiener Riesenrad, we took the U-Bahn U4 back to Landstraße. As we had the travel cards we though what a great opportunity to take a tram… trams are awesome. We took the number 0 tram all the way to Praterstern. When we got off the tram and looked up we could instantly see the Ferris wheel, it was huge… and so old and beautiful. We walked though the park to the wheel where we discovered it was actually in an amusement park (Wurstelprater). The amusement park is sooooooo big. Just as we got to the entrance of the Ferris wheel we noticed a pressed penny machine… Fiona and I are obsessed with them, we were so happy we found one lol… obviously we had to stop and play.

The Ferris wheel itself is so old I believe it was built in 1897, the pods were all made of wood. When we got on it started to rock… it was really creepy… a little scary to be honest haha. The view was gorgeous… we could see out hotel from the top and had an amazing view of the whole of Vienna, and the amusement park of course haha

Once we got off the wheel we popped into the gift shop where I found another pressed penny machine and of course we had to play… I bought my mum a fridge magnet from there too. We decided to look around the park a bit, it was too cold so didn’t really get on any of the rides. The park was huuuuuge. When we got back to the entrance of the park we noticed like a million people with green and yellow scarfs… I’m guessing there was a football match on somewhere near by. We had been walking around for ages it was time to get food… us being as mad as we were decided to get Mc Donald’s. Nuggets and chips… yep sounds like a normal day at Mc D’s.

It was getting quite late so we decided to head back to the hotel, we grabbed the U-Bahn U2 again back to Stadion. The tubes were quite full, again with the green and yellow scarfs. As we got off we noticed exactly what was going on… Stadion is surprisingly the home of Ernst Happel Stadium. That night SK Rapid Wien were playing Bayer Leverkusen in the UEFA Europa League. Sadly they lost 4 nil but still, we were so close hehe. As it was crowded and police everywhere we decided to tuck into the local shopping center. There was a shop called Mister Lady… it had some awesome clothes… I’m so going to have to look them up now I’m back home. We walked around a bit and found a pet shop too, they had the most adorable white kittens and some puppies too… I wanted to take them all home. Being the exciting people we are all we ended up buying was shampoo haha.

After a long day of walking around the zoo, the park and the shopping center we decided tonight was the best night to take advantage of our Jacuzzi. We popped up to the Jacuzzi and sat in there for a bit, it was soooooo warm compared to the weather outside… it was so nice just to sit and relax. After a little soak we went to get changed and obviously had to steal the little wash bottles… they were adorable and so good. Once we got changed we again decided to take advantage of the executive lounge. We went upstairs and could see and hear the stadium from our window. We grabbed a few drinks and some nibbles and just chilled. I got some popcorn, haribo cola bottles, pretzels and other little nibbles. No one really came up to the lounge and it was a little lonely so we decided to go down to the bar to make some friends… when we got there, there was no one there. It was deserted, rubbish really 😞 even the restaurant was empty. We decided to head back to the room where we spent some time mucking about with our newly acquired teddy bears and just generally having a laugh. We decided to plot out our journey for the next day, it didn’t look too bad to get to the meeting place of the Contiki tour. I think in the end after all the mucking about and being silly we ended up going to sleep at about 11.30pm.

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