Toussaints #3.5 Vienna

Vienna: Where I saw a castle, my feet got soaked, and failed to appreciate a city

When planning this trip Chelsea and I had obviously inhaled some sort of noxious fumes or maybe we're still not used to the Grenoble altitude and we weren't thinking straight. Apparently 6 cities in 2 weeks wasn't enough, so we decided to add Vienna to our itinerary as a day trip from Budapest.

As usual we had an early start: we woke up at 5:45 am to catch the tram to catch the 3.5 hour bus to Vienna, the once-seat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

To me, Vienna felt a lot like Brussels: just sort of a normal city with a few Habsburg castles thrown about, all similar with their big green domes. That and the Shonbrunn Castle and the gardens behind it. Chelsea, on the other hand, adored Vienna, it was her favorite city, which makes me think that maybe I was just too tired to fully appreciate it, or we didn't see the right things. To be fair, we didn't really go into any major museums or castles, maybe all the mind blowing stuff was hiding in there? Don't get me wrong, it was a nice city, no regrets, but I've seen better.

Looking back on the photos, I think it might have also been the miserable weather. It was cold and pouring rain almost the whole time and my shoes were soaked through. In any case I think Vienna is probably a lot cooler than what I personally experienced.

The trip itself was good though, very laid back. We just walked around, looked at things, went into a cafe and hung out there for a while before heading back home.

When we got back on the bus that night we were cold and wet and happy to be heading back to our beds. We returned at 11:00 pm, tired beyond sanity, talking and laughing about complete nonsense, we were obviously losing our minds. I don't even know what in the world we were talking about: what country are we even in, what language should we be speaking? German, Hungarian, Italian? We were talking about goats and my aircraft being full of eels and her trying to give me a Japanese or Italian nickname... I don't know.

Okay, picture time.

Schonbrunn Palace: former summer house for the Hapsburgs 

The gardens behind the castle. It was here that it started to rain, boo. If I ever go back to Vienna I would make sure it was sunny and then spend way more time in the ardens

St. Charles Church. We didn't go in, but I googled some pictures of the inside and it looks stunning

We didn't go in but click here for a 360 view of the inside

There was some kind of display in front of the church and this was their attempt at an English translation, I found it hilarious

The display

The famous opera house. Too bad I'm not a fan of opera. 

Monika: I think you'd like it here, these old dead music guys were everywhere and I only knew one or two of them

Richey shoppey street

And of course, chocolate