Wien (Vienna)

Hope you enjoyed Praha (Prague) because I sure did! Now on to the middle of my "spring break" - Vienna, Austria.

In the last blog I forgot to mention that Praha does not use the Euro. Instead they use Krowns. The money difference was not too bad, but we were still glad to be back in Euros in Austria.

To begin, I arrived in Vienna around 2pm after leaving Prague around 10 that morning. Of course the first thing on the list when arriving in any new city is to find the hostel and get the backpack off! (Backpacks tend to get heavy after wearing them for days on end.) By a miracle once again we found our hostel within 20 minutes!

Kathy insisted we see where she had attended a Ball two nights before. Turns out she went to a Ball at the Imperial Palace. We slipped inside to take a peak and were amazed at the grandeur of the place. Imagine everything a fairy tale dream come true and you have this place.

Next we just mingled around Vienna enjoying the sites of a new city. Of course dinner time arrived and we were hungry! After walking around for about an hour, we discovered the place we had researched to be completely off on their prices (said the average meal was 7 Euro when in reality it was an average of 40 Euros a plate). Instead we found a place called the Centimeter.

In the picture on the left Amanda and I pose with our menus that were thankfully in English! Being in Austria and having liked the bratwurst in Germany, I decided to try the Centimeter's bratwurst. It was delicious. This restaurant was the first place we had been where the food portions where more than enough!

My belly quite content with energy, we are all determined to accomplish one thing in Vienna - ice skating. This was the highlight of my week!

Ice skating will never be the same. Going round and round in a rink listening to music is fun. But skating down ice laden paths lit only by Christmas lights is literally like a fairy tale come true.

The ice skating was located in front of the Vienna Parliament named the Rathouse. At first I was convinced the Rathouse was a Gothic style church. The outside of the building was beautiful especially with all of the blue, purple, and yellow lights shooting off.

There were two opposite square rinks that had music playing. Connecting the two rinks were the ice-covered paths. The paths wound around to give skaters a peaceful experience. How great it was to escape everyone and have some alone time for a little bit. Please do not get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy traveling with the group. But each of us needed time to soak everything that has happened the last 4 weeks.

The peace and quiet and simplicity of skating was the perfect remedy to all of the busyness.

We were all exhausted after 3 hours of continuous skating and slept very well that night.

The following morning alarms woke us up early; that afternoon we were leaving Vienna to continue our journey forward. There was still so much to see!

For breakfast we stopped at a local bakery and ate along the way to a museum. Arriving at the museum I discover our student IDs are not enough to get us the student discount in. And unfortunately a regular price ticket was almost double a student price. So no museum.

Instead we went to the famous Sachre Hotel. This hotel is known more for its chocolate cake than its hotel services. This cake is hard to explain. The icing was a hard chocolate shell while the inside was moist. Thankfully milk is served with the slice of chocolaty goodness to help wash down the dark chocolate. Mmmm but still so good! A great way to end our unfortunate short time in Vienna, Austria.