DAY 10: Vienna

Monday, August 16th 2010

We woke up very early (at 6:35, to be exact) and got ready to leave. We wanted to catch the 9:10 train to Vienna and it was already at the station when we got there. It's a good thing we were fairly early, because we were able to get seats. Quite a lot of people had to stand. The 2.5 hour train ride went by quickly without anything out of the ordinary.

We got off at the Wien Meidling station and got ourselves maps of the city. Crappiest maps so far. Very annoying to use - metro map on one side and city map on the other side. My map tore almost completely by the end of our stay. We found more or less where the Wien Camping Süd is located on the map, and couldn't quite tell if it was too far to walk. But first things first - we went to McDonald's and got ourselves some light and healthy lunch (cheesecake and ice caramel latte macchiato for me :P) After that we were off. We found the right street and quickly realized that the Camping Site was way too far to walk to, so we took a bus, which stopped right across the street from it.

My lunch :)

We took care of the payment and other formalities, and set up our tent:

Ta-daaa! All set.

We bought 24-h Vienna cards, which would allow us to travel unlimited for 24 hours, and headed for the Old Town. Stephansdom was pretty cool, although a large part of it was covered up due to construction work. We went inside, and the Cathedral wasn't all that special - same old Gothic style Cathedral :P

Street view

We then started looking for a place to eat and finally settled on a Cafe-Restaurant Frauenhuber. Turns out it's the oldest cafe in Vienna, and Mozart's last public appearance as a pianist took place there in 1791. It wasn't even all that expensive, and the food was good. And the waiter was very polite and gentlemanly. After dinner we walked to the Hofburg Imperial Palace, and walked around that whole area. It took us quite a while, and there was a lot to see. We saw the Rathaus, the Parliament Building, the Museum of Natural History, Museum of Art History... There were a lot of beautiful buildings. The University of Vienna was awesome, I felt a bit jealous. The negative side was that most of the Old Town smelled like horse poo, because there were horse carriages going around constantly. 

Hofburg Palace and The statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy (same dude as in front of the Buda Castle!)

Museum of Art History

After we'd finished exploring the Hofburg Palace grounds, we walked to St Peter's Church. It looked quite plain on the outside, so I didn't expect much. I was stunned when we walked in though. Stephansdom was boring in comparison. And people were actually there to pray - the whole place was silent. 

 St Peter's Church from the outside and from the inside

By the time we left, it was getting late, so we decided to start looking for a grocery store, to get breakfast. Turns out most stores close around 7 pm, ant we didn't find a single store that would be open 24/7. There was a large supermarket right by our camping site though, so we decided to go there first thing in the morning. At 20:30 we got to the bus stop and took a bus to the camping site. It was already quite dark. The reception at the camping site was already closed when we got there. There wasn't really anything we could do, especially since we only had a crappy flashlight with us and it was dark, so we just went to sleep. It was 21:30. I tried remembering the last time I would've gone to sleep that early and couldn't :D

-Brain