Central Europe Tour:Day 07 - Vienna

---

We got ready by 8:30 or so. Since we had combined museum tickets, today's plan was to visit the Koonst museum. We headed to the breakfast lounge instead. Here we did have additional items prepared. We had made to order omelettes, yogurt with granola etc. It was fairly a good spread. Our first stop was the Koonst museum. This is a huge museum with multiple floors and sections. We started from the European section and then moved on to Greek, Roman and Egypt. After 3 hours of information overload, we wanted to take a break. There were plenty of antiquities to see. Again, we got the audio guide. It is quite cheap and very descriptive on certain topics. The name of the museum Koosthistoriches means, collection of items from history. This initially started as a hobby by the Habsburg royal family. After some time, this dynasty started collecting artifacts and key memorabilia from all corners of the world. There were lot of items from Asia as well, including India and Sri Lanka. It was past lunch time and we had walked enough by now. We did not want to head back to the hotel which was 20 minutes away for lunch. So we decided to get out of the museum (after obtaining a return pass) and try the Sacher torte dessert item. This sweet delicacy was first created in this location not too far from the museum. We went to the original pastry shop. It was crowded, but they were quickly finding seats for the customers. We had Torte and Coffee like a typical Wien! The menu card has the history behind how this pastry was first created. For the second half of the Museum visit, we decided to cover the paintings by popular European artists. This covered a range from 13th century to all the way to the present. We were in the museum till the closing time which was 5:30 PM in the evening. We would have probably covered 60% of the museum after spending nearly whole day in the Museum. We walked back to our hotel and headed straight to the executive lounge. We were hoping find some vegetarian items that would help us skip our dinner. It was not to be. So we decided to venture out for dinner. After obtaining recommendation from Hotel front-desk for a good eatery, we headed to an Italian restaurant called "Da Capo". This restaurant was walk-able from the hotel. Typically all the streets are well marked here with street names. So it was easy to find the place with the inner city map that we had with us. This place was nearly full and we were lucky to get seats. We were served with some great pasta dishes including primavera. The whole ambiance and experience was very good. Sandhya and I went for a walk post dinner in the park opposite to our hotel.

---