Vienna

I guess one of the benefits of of having a national religion is that Good Friday and the day after Easter are national holidays, so we had a free four day weekend. We planned a large group trip with several of our Global Exchange friends to Austria. Travelling with us were Eric & Anne from KC, Tommy & Anna from Finland, Joanne from Chicago and now working in Paris, Cecilia from NYC, Kia from NYC, and Brad, who was visiting Kia for the week (that is 10 of us in total).

Since we saw three different cities, we decided that the best option was to break up the trip into separate blog entries, so that we can get them posted faster and you, our faithful readers, don't have to spend so much time on one entry.

Day 1 (Good Friday, April 10th) - Vienna

We flew out early on Friday morning (once again leaving the house before 5am), but it allowed us to get checked into the hotel pretty early. This time we stayed at Vienna Hilton thanks to a recession sale. Then we headed out for lunch and to see the city. We stopped at a local restaurant and sat outside to enjoy the nice sunny day. I had some frankfurters and Jenna enjoyed some tomato dumplings. After lunch we set out to see the city. One of the downsides of travelling on the holidays reared its head, as most of the sites were closed (something we ran into all weekend). We saw all of the main sites (Opera House, Town Hall, etc) from the outside, but we think (or tell ourselves) that there really wasn't much to see inside anyway.

The one thing that was open was the Hofsburg Palace, which was the main home of the Hapsburg Empire for several hundred years.

We went in and saw the main museum, which holds the crown jewels and lots of other tidbits owned by the royals (the empire is gone now, but the jewels are still a tourist draw). It was okay, but I still think that the outside buiilding and gardens were better.

We moved on and saw the main shopping street, which was full of tourist shops, McDonald's, and H&M, so we flew through there pretty quick to the Cathedral. This was supposed to have a great view from the main spire, but of course we were unable to get up there since they were having a Good Friday mass.

The day was winding down so we headed to dinner at a traditional Austrian restaurant where we got some good food and they played live music, so that was a lot of fun. We ended up sitting around for a while talking and didn't get out of there until almost 11:00 (way past our bedtime), so we headed back to the hotel to rest up.

Day 2 (Sat, April 11th) in Vienna

The big group had decided to split up for the morning to do our own sightseeing, and then meet up around lunch to go see another palace. Since us and Eric & Anne wanted to do the same thing, the four of us met for breakfast (free in the hotel and AMAZING) and then headed out to see the Belvedere Palace.

This is a large palace grounds area, with 2 main buildings separated by a large garden. We're not sure what it was originally used for (there are a lot of palaces in Vienna), but now they have 2 separate museums in the buildings. We didn't have a ton of time, and didn't really care about the museums much, so we just took in the gardens and fountains and beautiful morning.

Next we went off to meet the rest of the group so that we could go to the Schloss Schonbrunn. This was the summer palace of the Dynasty, but from the looks of it you'd think it was the main home. We took the palace tour, which had the worst audio guide in history. We're not usually big fans of the guides because they talk too slow and go into too much detail, but generally you can skip around when they get too boring. This one had no fast forward, though, so you had to listen to everything. There were 25 rooms, and by the time we got through the whole thing I think we'd gotten through 16 rooms on the guide.

The great thing about the palace was the "back yard". There are several acres of grounds, including a zoo, a hedge maze, and endless gardens that we spent about an hour exploring but by no means saw even half of. We took a lot of pictures of this, so you can see for yourself what the backyard of our dream house will be modeled on.

We all had to catch trains in the evening, so after leaving the palace we headed off to the train station. Everyone else was headed to the Alps to ski, but Jenna and I opted to go into Germany to see Munich, since it is so close...