Everybody ona Move

10/06/2009

Today we saw Vienna. Vienna was not exactly what I pictured. For some reason, I thought it would be a quaint little town with a very nice boys choir and many eateries to enjoy classic Austrian dishes. In reality, it reminded me a little bit of NYC, so go Vienna for making yourself big.

We woke up around 8 to head off towards a palace that was used for a summer home/hunting lodge for the Hapsburgs. I ate my leftovers from dinner last night and I really could not believe how good cold pasta tasted. We took the tram to the palace (again for free, we are really trying our luck with doing this, but I guess that is part of the experience). We realized this as we walked out, but thank goodness we arrived earlier in the morning before the masses began crowding all of the rooms. We took a very pleasant basic audio tour through the main parts of the palace. It is truly crazy to think that at some point in time someone really did come up to the place and think to themselves that this massive property is only their summerhouse. The place was decorated to the nines. It was pretty cool to see all of the lavish decorations. The audio tour worked out great too. This was the first time we had done an audio tour and I think that this palace was the best place to take advantage of it. It was like reliving our high school Modern European History class. After our tour we decided to take a horse drawn cart around the gardens for 5 euro. After it was done, I decided that I thought it was an extremely efficient way to see the gardens and totally worth the 5 euro because we even got a little background of what we were looking at from the cart driver. The gardens were beautiful, but like the palace probably required so much maintenance on the upkeep. I just really cant imagine doing all of that work way back when. They told us that the entire property was bigger than the country of Monaco and one of the major ladies that lived in the palace had ankle length hair, which she went threw a 3-4 hour daily routine of keeping up on her hair. I found both of these facts to be extremely wild.

After the palace we wanted to check out another open air market and the city center but were not really sure how to get their using public transportation so we decided to take the tram back to the hostel (because we did know how to do that) and ask the hostel for the best way to get to where we wanted to go in addition to any other helpful information. This hostel was just great, so helpful and just a cool place to stay in general. The lady told us that the open-air market was only a 15-minute walk from the hostel so we headed off in that direction. We wanted to catch a later afternoon train to Salzburg and had finished with the palace relatively early so we had some time to kill.

The open air market turned out to be my least favorite in comparison to the other ones we had scene. It was nice to walk their and get a feel for Vienna, which I told yall earlier surprised me. At the open air market we got lunch. I got a Vienna sausage for my native food kick. It was delicious. We also bought dinner for the train ride from one of the vendors, which consist of falafel, bread, and hummus, all of good portions to the tune of 5 euro. After picking that up we headed back to the hostel to pick up our packs that we had left their in storage for the day and then eventually moved in the direction of the train station, which was just a short walk from the hostel. All of the walking was a bit hard on my foot. Im not sure what is wrong with it. Its not terrible pain just a lot of soreness. Im hoping it is a just a bad bruise that will get better in about a week.

The train ride from Vienna to Salzburg was very pleasant. It was a little more like the Hogwarts express in that it did have a drink cart come by. This pleased me greatly even though we didn’t get anything from it. For the majority of the ride we had our own compartment to ourselves. We left our bags on the seats in hopes that people would stay clear of our cabin due to cluttering, but a few people popped in and made themselves cozy, but never stayed for long. I guess they were only doing short train rides. We slept, read, listened to music, and ate our dinner (which was satisfying). The scenery outside was beautiful with fall colors. We really enjoy the train rides as a time to have to ourselves.

We got into Salzburg and it was pretty dark, which made it feel much later than it really was. We had an ok time finding the hostel, nothing too stressful, but not the smoothest either. This hostel is very nice with people hanging gout everywhere. Once a night the do a showing of the sound of Music, how appropriate. We are in an 8 person female dorm that has lockers right outside for our packs, which is very convenient. Also this hostel was extremely cheap for the quality we are getting. Apparently the breakfast is outstanding. There are a lot of elders hanging around it and some families. I guess I never really thought of it, but if you wanted your family to travel, staying in a hostel would be a very cost effective way to do that.

When we scheduled Austria and Switzerland into our itineraries we weren’t really sure what we were going to do in each place but figured we were over here so might as well go to them and figure out what to do when we got there. So far that has worked out pretty great. When we walked into the hostel something major caught our eyes. I had talked to one of my grandparents friends before about doing the salt mine tours in Salzburg. She said it was an incredibly cool experience. Well what caught our eyes in the hostel was a discounted package of doing a salt mine tour in addition to a Sound of Music tour! Yes we signed up for it and are very much looking forward to them tomorrow. When in Rome.

After settling in we decided we might try to see what Salzburg night life was like so we walked around for a little while only to be severely disappointed that all of the parts were extremely sketchy with black lights. Our hostel does have a bar in it that serves Edelweiss beer, so after witnessing the pitiful bar scene we decided that the hostel was the perfect place to have a drink and sit outside on the quaint little patio they have going on. It turned out to be extremely pleasant and the Edelweiss beer turned out to be a delicious wheat beer, which pleased me greatly.