Travelog written by Ben
October 11, 2007 at 3:50:35am
Taking Vienna In
When we arrived in Vienna we headed to a hostel Felipe had picked up a flyer on that looked great. It was great. The place is beautiful and much, much more than what you would expect of a hostel. But they were full. We didn't know it but it turned out to be a national holiday on Thursday and all the hostels in town were full. So we spent almost two hours trying to figure out if we could just leave and go to Bratislava that night or get a hotel or even just leave for Munich. It turns out all the hostels in Bratislava were full too. Just when we were about at our wits end one of the hostel workers came and told us a lady across the street will rent out beds in her apartment if we were just looking for a place to sleep. The lady was nice enough to put us up in one of her rooms with about 7 other people. It wasn't quite a hostel, but not bad at all. Luck was on our side.
Vienna was beautiful with all types of amazing architecture. We saw the historic part of town that night and watched some of the soccer match at a nice little cafe.
The next morning we woke up, packed and left our luggage at the hostel, and headed out on our last day in Vienna. Our first stop was the wonderful palace. We took a quick audio guided tour of the palace and then slid out back to the gardens. The gardens are amazing and huge. I would imagine it would take a full 10 person grounds keeping crew to keep everything looking so nice. After the palace tour Brandon pointed out that one of the trams in Vienna was basically its own riding tour. You can jump on and it will take you all around the city and drive by almost all of the major sights. We did that and jumped off wherever we wanted to take pictures. After the tour we realized that it was getting close to time to catch our next train and headed back to the hostel. The problem was that the hostel is close to one of the train stations and our train to Prague was at a different train station. We had to basically run with all our luggage to barely make it to our train. We jumped on just before it was taking off. It was a close call, but that only makes it more exciting! |
