Day 18 - Vienna - Tram Ride & Food Market

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Once we had gotten up eaten and showered, we hopped on the tube and back into the main ring to checkout some of the cities administrative buildings. We started with Parliament which has a large statue of the Greek goddess of wisdom (Athena?) outside. Our tour guide from the day before said it was to encourage some wisdom to enter the building, but she didn't feel it worked. After that it was just up the road to the town hall, an equally grand building of which the surrounding park and grounds frequently host events. At the moment it is the Vienna 'film festival' however, at least when we were there, it was more musical performances rather than films. Tonight the Vienna philharmonic orchestra were playing. There were lots of food trucks and bars around and even at 11:30 in the morning, it was already starting to get busy.

We wandered across towards the river Danube via an impressive cathedral, which was unfortunately covered in scaffolding, and Sigmund Freud Park. Unfortunately it then started to rain, so we hopped on a tube one stop to get to the 'Ring Tram' a 25minute non-stop tram ride with audio tour around e ring road which encircles the city centre. We had a 25 minute wait which Dan filled with a McPiss and a McFlurry and I grabbed a couple of free bottles of a new shandy like drink which was doing a launch event in Schwedenplatz (where we were waiting). The tour itself taught us a few new things about the city and we snapped up a few pics including a WWII memorial and the oldest church in Vienna.

Having worked up a hunger it was back to Nachtmarkt for some lunch. We decided on a Mediterranean place called Nani de Nachtmarkt which we had seen on TripAdvisor. There was no English on the menu, so we did our best to translate and guess what our options were. Dan played it safe with a pulled beef burger and fries. I went for a Korean chicken salad and homemade hummus and pita bread, it was delicious!

The sun was beating down hard on us again and we were already sticky and getting heavy legs but we decided to hop on the tram down to Belvedere the winter residence of the same monarchy who's summer home we visited yesterday. Again, we didn't fancy shelling out for tickets for the exhibitions, so we just walked around the grounds for a bit before walking back into town via another memorial of some sort, not 100% on what it was for, but there was a soldier on top and a lot of Russian writing, so we are guessing some kind of war or effects of communism memorial.

We had been recommended to visit the Music Museum by our current host Sandra, the museum is dedicated to all things sound and its main staircase is a giant keyboard. We popped in here but again the pricing didn't tally up with our level of interest, so we gave it a miss, popped into a souvenir shop for Dan to grab some postcards then headed home via a Spar (we made sure we got there before 8pm this time!). We showered up (this is becoming the favourite part of my day!) made some ostrich pesto pasta for dinner (they had no chicken) and watched a bit of family guy on my iPad before hitting the hay for the night.

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