Vienna, Austria

OK, I'll try to get back on track here. I had some issues after staying up until 5 a.m. yesterday morning, namely sleeping until 4 yesterday afternoon. But I seem to be back on a normal sleep schedule now, and can resume the telling of our European odyssey.

As I mentioned, from Munich we continued on down to Austria. Austria reminded me a lot of Vermont, if someone took Vermont by the edges and stretched it out a bit; lots of rolling hills and fields, punctuated by some pretty dramatic mountains. We'd initially intended on stopping in Salzburg, home of Mozart and the Sound of Music. In the end, we settled for waiting in Salzburg station for an hour before continuing on to Vienna.

Vienna turned out to be a really wonderful city, and before we got to Geneva it was the front runner in the 'places we want to live' ranking. It oozes history, is clean though slightly dog-crappy (things tended to get dirtier the further south we went), has great public transportation, great museums and restaurants, and nice young, energetic vibe. It's also easy to get out of the city and into that beautiful countryside. On the train into town, we were in the sticks until about 2 minutes before we arrived at the station.

One of the major claims to fame in Austria is the legacy of the Hapsburgs. We spent a lot of time visiting Hapsburg related palaces and museums, which was pretty interesting. None of them did a very good job of identifying who they actually were, and the only definitive bit of info that I came away with is that one of them married his cousin, and she became an icon after she was murdered. What all those Hapsburg museums did make very clear was how stinking rich they were. The massive yellow palace below was there SUMMER house.

We spent two nights in Vienna at a great hostel (the name escapes me but if you want to know I can dig it up), where we rented a private room with it's own bathroom for a very reasonable price. The hostel also had it's own bar with local brew on tap for the bargain happy hour price of 2 Euros, which was very nice. Add to that guitars, a piano, and some bongos, all free to use for people staying at the hostel, and the place was quite cool.

Once you get off the main drag in Vienna, it's a maze of cobblestone streets that tunnel between beautiful old buildings that have been very well maintained, which wasn't the case in many of the cities we visited. There are also ample parks to chill out in while trekking around the city. The picture at the bottom is from a park that had some ice rinks set up, and then this ice path that ran around the inner parts of the park--pretty cool.








In the next few installments we'll head to Italy. Let the disappointment begin!!