Vienna is the capital of Austria and the “city of music” which is the city where the waltz originated. We waltzed our way into that city without a real plan, which was sort of a trend with us on this trip. We first headed over to see a building made by my friends Phil and Claire’s Great-great-grandfather (they think) which was a building that had an amazing gold leaf dome.
We then realized we had checked off the only thing on our list and didn’t know what else to see, so we did what I love to do—hopped on a hour long bus tour. It took us all around the city and we got to hear a lot of great history. We also learned on this tour about Viennese’s coffee shops and how important coffee shops are to their culture. Rumor has it that the Polish army brought some “strange bags of beans” over with them after they invaded Turkey and one of the officers was given the beans and started the first coffee shop and the rest is history.
After our tour we enjoyed delicious street hotdogs and pretzels—so good.
We then toured some on foot and of course ate gelato. I had been to Vienna before when I was in 7th grade so it was fun remembering things or finding familiar buildings and statues. This is also the city where the famous Lipizzaner Stallions are from. When I was here before I watched them perform in the palace. These horses basically do horse ballet; it is incredible. The horses stable is in the Schönbrunn Palace. The thing that the group decided on that was the most amazing part about Vienna was that on every corner the architecture is beautiful. The buildings are just spectacular and similar looking wherever you end up.
We stayed in a hotel in Vienna, thanks to Phil’s Marriot points. We went back to the hotel took naps and got ready and went to an amazing dinner at Zwolf Apostelkeller. The dining room was a basement brick dining room and went pretty deep under ground. We shared a meat platter, cheese platter, schznitzel platter and sides of potatoes, saurkrawt and dumplings. I got to try a first here too. On the meat platter they had blood sausage. Blood sausage is basically what is sounds like and I’m not going to go into detail about it because it may gross some people out. If you want to know in depth about it, just google it. It had a very weird spread like consistancy and the taste was very similar to liver. Not bad though.
We walked the streets and ended up getting beer at a bubble tea stand; odd but fun. We also found another Pub like the one in Prague with the beer taps at the tables. We hit the hay a little bit earlier than usual and got up early to take the train to Salzburg.
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