Vienna: The Beginning

Hi everyone,
It has definitely been a while! We had a 4 day weekend here in Germany, and so we went to Vienna and Prague for 4 days. I just got back late last night so I am still in the recovery phase. This post will be about Vienna, and I will write 1 or 2 more to finish off the story of Vienna and Prague.

We took the night train to Vienna. We did our best to sleep, but the seats did not recline (at all) which made this a little bit difficult...We got to Vienna nice and early on Thursday morning. After checking in to our Hostel (which by the way was amazing!) We went to a nearby Schloss! So Schloss is one of approximately 15 German words I have learned so far (10 of those are the numbers from 1 to 10 :)), it means...Castle!

Now a North American might think that this is single handedly the most useless word you can ever learn in German. However, in the last 3 weeks I have been to SO SO SO many of these Schlosses, that I am starting to think it is the most useful word I learned so far. This particular one was called Schönbrunn. Its a huge palace with any beautiful gardens, located in the south west corner of my map of the Vienna centre. We actually did a tour of its inside, and to be honest it was a little bit more impressive than Casa Loma. This specific castle was home to Franz Joseph, who I believe was a ruler in the early 19th century. His wife Elizabeth also lived there, and apparently she is famous under the name Sisi (There are movies about her under this name...). His mother (who also lived there during her reign) was named Maria Theresa, and she ruled the Kingdom of Austria before Franz Joseph. She was actually the mother of Marie Anoinette...and 15 other children. The interesting thing is that she would marry her children to the right people for political favours. And so Marie Antoinette ended up marrying into the French royal family. Anyway, we saw a bunch of nice rooms and the beautiful gardens. Pictures should be uploaded to facebook once I sort through them (there are far too many as you might expect...)

The other really curious thing about this palace is that it seems to be the place to jog. Almost everyone we saw could be grouped into 2 categories- tourist or jogger. It seemed like the place to be if you like to run. The same day we visited the Botanical gardens (plus a Schloss there...see pictures:)). We also walked around the Vienna centre for a while. One of the most impressive things was a World War II memorial erected by the Soviets (it was in Russian)...you will see pictures of that as well! All the buildings in the centre were beautiful. It will be hard to return to skyscrapers and rectangular buildings after this...

That night we went to the Opera. You can get standing room tickets for 3 euro, and you don't have to dress up super fancy which is a plus when you only brought one backpack of clothes. The opera itself was called Simon, and it was in Italian. The singing was beautiful, and we got really lucky in the sense that there were English subtitles on these small screens below where we stood. Yay! The storyline was still difficult to understand even with the direct translation. But the singing was great!

We finished the night with a ride on this ancient Ferris Wheel, in an amusement park. The amusement park is open 24/7, and unlike the CNE there is no admission fee to enter, you just pay for separate rides. This specific Ferris wheel is famous because it was built in the 19th century, and has been spinning ever since! You get quite a good view of Vienna from above...and that's when you realize that Vienna has very few sky scrapers. I think really the big (and perhaps only, in terms of aesthetics) benefit of sky scrapers is that they make the sky line look beautiful at night. So the ride on the wheel was fun, but not breathtaking like standing on the top of the Empire State building at night (New York has crazy sky scrapers AND ridiculous lights)...

We then went back to our hostel and practically passed out...walking around castles all day gets pretty tiring!
I will try to write about part 2 of Vienna tonight :) And will post pictures once I wade through them!

I also think I fixed the commenting. So comment away!

Alina