Vienna Part I: Wed, July 22nd

We left super early for Vienna and discovered that the seats on the trains pull out... 3 seats facing 3 seats all pull out and makes a giant bed! The first train from Berlin to Prague, we reserved seats, this time we learned that it's not necessary to reserve seats, in fact the trains are never completely full. If you don't reserve seats, you can almost always find an empty cabin all to yourself, and save the reservation money.


After getting off the train, we made our way to the city center... which was a long, horribly hot and tiring walk. Once we got to the city center and got a map of hostels and hotels, we realized that there weren't many cheap ones that close to the center... so we walked back out. We got off the train at 10 am and didn't find a hotel until 5 pm. We walked through most of the important sites, but both Fay and I were way too hot and tired to notice.



Vienna is a very neat city, nicely shaped foliage and gardens with white grand architecture from the baroque period... very different from the dark gothic architecture that dominated Prague.


There were some very interesting statues and carvings... some of them looked pretty contemporary to me. This one in particular I stood and looked at for a good 10 minutes. It's hard to see in this picture, but each one of the character's faces is full of a different emotion and the entire statue portrays a very vivid story.


There is a famous pastry shop in one of the plazas with a lady made off pastry in the window, it was cute. Sorry for the lack of description of buildings and sites, I just don't really remember them...


Maybe it was the heat, or maybe it was the massive mosquito attack we endured going out at night leaving all of us with 8-12 bites within 3 minutes, I didn't enjoy Vienna very much. It is also a very expensive city, we got a 70 euro hotel room with only 2 beds (that was the cheapest we can find walking) with a shower but no bathroom in the room. The room seemed like a giant bathroom to me with a shower in the corner and no AC even though it was humid and hot. We were afraid to open the windows at night due to the mosquitos.

Even though today we pretty much walked the entire city, I don't feel very aquanted yet. There were museums and churches and governmental buildings.. but I don't think I can point any of them out by name.

Also, there are advertisments everywhere for classical musical concerts with all the members of the chamber orchestra dressed in "mozart attire" with wigs and all. Mozart-ism is definitely used for tourist attractions in this city.

There are many horse carriages available for tourists as well. At night, a big cleaning vehicle sprays the streets down to clean horse crap, not the best smelling city.

To me, all this wig-wearing, mozart-dressing performances and horse carriage atmosphere makes me feel like I'm not in a real city by a performance... maybe it's the heat that got to me, but the dress up for tourists deal really didn't appeal to me.

Tomorrow is day trip to Salzburg.