Advertisement
Published: March 9th 2018
Edit Blog Post
We started our morning with a bus tour pretty much just around the ring road - literally a road that rings around the Old Town. We drove by a lot of statues and important buildings. We also drove by Stadtpark which gave me an idea for later. We then stopped at a Hundertwasser building - a famous artist/architect. Hundertwasser House is a low-income apartment but decorated/created in a very unique and quirky style. Different apartments are different colours, there's all these random details on the outside, it's all green-space on top, and there's not a single straight-line anywhere. I loved it.
I also loved watching the kids... we had about 15 min there and honest to God they spent more time taking pictures with a red phone booth (like what they have in London) than they did with the building lol.
Schönbrunn Palace was next - which was amazing. See, I have a love/hate thing with palaces because as much as I love the outside of them, once you're inside I'm pretty much of the opinion that you've seen one, you've seen them all since they're relatively the same thing and you're not allowed to take pictures so you
can't even play around the angles and trying to see things in a new way. That being said, Schönbrunn was pretty damn gorgeous - inside and out. It's enormous to begin with (1000+ rooms). Apparently they originally planned to have 4000+ rooms to be bigger and better than Versailles... but then realized they didn't have the money for it lol. We had a guided tour inside, so it was nice to get the historical aspects of the palace and the family. (Like, I had no idea Marie Antoinette was part of the Imperial family/Austrian??) It is crazy to see how much gold is everywhere though - like it is insane to think about the cost of gold-leafing pretty much everything in those rooms.
We had time to walk around afterwards and explore the grounds a bit - not a lot, a lot of time... but some time. Amy and I went to see the gardens - or at least what will be gardens when the flowers bloom lol. But there were some statues and a few other little things to see at least. Again, it's more about the vastness of the place than anything else, really. It was also
nice to explore around a bit for the random graffiti and those little gems I like to hunt for.
We walked briefly around Museumsplatz/the area with museums and such before having free-time for lunch and exploration. This time we were on one of the modernized shopping streets. Instead I decided to head back to Stadtpark to get some green space (well, as much green as you can find in March), hear the birds and just get out of some of the hustle and bustle. It was lovely. When I got back to meet up with everyone I had to laugh because most of the kids just stayed on the shopping street and ate McDonald's for lunch. (Which most also had YESTERDAY). Dudes. I'm going to like chase them into an Austrian (or at least European of some sort) fast food place tomorrow just so they try something different lol. Some kids did go back towards the National Library and back towards some other spots we saw though to have more time to explore - so it was fun to hear about their days.
Met up with everyone back near Museumsplatz and we walked back towards the Old Town
where we then had another 1h30 of free time back in the same shopping area as yesterday. Yeah. We ended up just roaming around as teachers, went to Starbucks, looked for any small souvenirs we needed and that's that for seeing Vienna, really.
Dinner tonight was really good again. We had chicken n mushroom sauce with rice, and some sort of apple desert too. I'm very pleasantly surprised with food so far!
Tomorrow we're off to Salzburg! Woo!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.077s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0557s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb