Day 5 - May 20th - Vienna Woods

   
    Today, since the weather was heavenly nice, we foraged into the Vienna Woods, a very ancient and protected forest. We hiked/walked up a nice trail, taking plenty of pictures along the way. 

  It was so beautiful and such a nice way to spend a Sunday abroad in Vienna. Just as luck would have it, as soon as we were hungry we reached the end of the trail and found a restaurant where we all gratefully sat down outside to eat. 

   I ate a Wienerschnitzel and fries and it was pretty dang good. According to European custom, we all sat around after we were done eating and just talked for hours it seemed like. We’ve done this at pretty much every nice place we’ve eaten so far. 

    After we finally decided it was time to go, we walked back down the trail, barely missed our bus, then caught another one that was wayyy too crowded, so we decided to walk a ways. We actually ended up walking quite a distance, until we finally happened upon an U-bahn station and rewarded ourselves with Magnum bars - my new love. We all decided to head back to our hostel for the night, but on the way we were stopped by ticket inspectors. We all confidently handed over our subway tickets, only to have the inspector start jabbering at me and Nicole about something on it. Our group got off and Alan and Amy came over to figure out what was going on. As it turns out, when Nicole and I bought our tickets, the date was automatically set for the next week since we got ours halfway through the current week. They were determined to fine us, as is mandatory for all subway-law-breakers, but Amy explained how we had no idea that we got the wrong ticket. She then pleaded with them to do us a favor and let us go without the 100 Euro fine, we really didn't mean any harm. Thankfully, her persuasive powers won out and they reluctantly let us go. Whew!! I was sure frantic for a minute there. 

     After escaping the subway system unharmed and unfined, we stopped at a grocery store for some food for breakfasts and snacks. I ended up buying a load of Milka chocolate bars for souvenirs for my family when I got home - best idea ever!! We also happened past our favorite Gelato place, so we couldn’t help but stop and get some; it was wonderful. All in all it was a pretty laid back, relaxing day, which I think we all needed.

Day 4 - May 19th - Nascht Market, Belvedere, Prater

(Warning: this is a long post, almost as long as this day felt...)

   Today we woke up early to catch the U-bahn to the part of Vienna where there’s this massive flea market every Saturday morning, it’s called the Nascht Market. It was so big and crowded that we walked around for two hours and still couldn’t possibly have looked at everything.

        

           I bought some souvenirs for my family and friends. I expected there to be more cheap stuff and more variety like in China, but the ‘commercial’ end of the Market all had the same stuff: same scarves, sunglasses, jewelry, clothes, and bags. The other end, the flea market, wasn’t much more than an outside DI or garage sale. I’m not too fantastic at finding treasures among the trash. Some of the other girls found some pretty cool stuff though.
    
       Around lunchtime we met up with Alan and his family at the Karlsplatz, then we all trundled onto the U-bahn again to go to the Belvedere, which is apparently one of the main attractions in Vienna. It actually was built as a summer palace for Prince Eugene of Savoy.

         While there, we started in the Lower Belvedere, the building where they had reception desk, cloakroom, and a cool Gold exhibit. We paid for both the gold exhibit and the Upper Belvedere permanent display. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take any pictures inside, because there was some pretty cool stuff. Actually, my favorite part of the gold exhibit was the architecture and decoration of the rooms they were housed in. They were incredibly rich and detailed, with beautiful paintings and murals on the walls and statues and stuff everywhere. After we were done with that, we meandered up to the Upper Belvedere. We walked slowly because the grounds of the Belvedere are beautiful.

       There were fountains, hedges, flowers, and paths everywhere; we had a pretty fun photoshoot as we walked. 

          

           Once we finally made it to the main building, we were blown away with how beautiful it was. The Belvedere is the museum that houses Klimt’s The Kiss, so we were way excited to see that. This museum was packed with beautiful, old paintings, some of which were quite famous. I decided the Kiss was my favorite - typical, I know - but it’s just such a striking piece. It was huge, much bigger than I thought it would be, and you could just feel the emotion oozing out of it. Too bad we couldn’t take pictures in here either, because I’m sure I’ll forget what I saw there. After walking and shopping and museum-shuffling for hours and hours, I was tired and hungry, so I left the other girls still in the museum and I went back to the lower Belvedere to find Heather and Suzanne, sure that they had managed to find some sort of delicious food. I wasn’t disappointed, they were sitting on a nice bench next to the museum café, just chilling in the sunshine. I bought a delicious-looking but mediocre-tasting chocolate cake and sat and ate with them on their lovely bench. We were waiting for quite a while for the other girls to show up, but it was nice to just hang out there in the warm sun. It was so nice, apparently, that I got quite the sunburn from it. Since it was my first sunburn of the summer, it was pretty red and tender for the next few days. I even wore a newly acquired scarf to hide it the next day…

   
        After we all met up again, Heather and Suzanne went back to their hotel while the rest of us walked to the famous apartment building built by Hundertwasser with no straight lines; even the ground was uneven. It was pretty cool, but there were people everywhere! I couldn’t stand to live there.

   

This sign pretty much captures the essence of the entire block where this famous apartment is.

       Then we all went to the Prater, an awesome amusement park in the middle of a wooded park. There we finally ate some delicious dinner. Kaitlyn, Lori, and I all got something different, then split it all three ways. It was sooo good.

       We almost lost Stevie at this point because I didn’t hear her say she was going to the bathroom. By the time we had chosen a place to eat and were all seated, we realized she wasn’t with us and we didn’t know where she went. We decided not to worry yet, she might wander around where we were, since we hadn’t actually gone too far away. Eventually she did find us, and we all ate like kings. After we had finished eating, we walked around the corner to check out the actual park.

First view of the park is dominated by this behemoth

     
        The first thing we did was have Kaitlyn hold all our stuff and take pictures while we (Nicole, Stevie, Lori, and I) rode the Prater Turm, the world’s tallest carousel swing ride, because Kaitlyn’s stomach wasn’t up to it.

     

Anxiously waiting in line - how awesome is it that we were at the very front!

Awesome tickets, we wanted to keep them

      

      
 

            It was so much fun! Lori and I shared a seat and we were laughing and screaming the whole time. I was brave enough to carefully clutch my phone while taking a picture of the sunset through the famous ferris wheel over the whole city with mountains in the background - it was gorgeous and surreal.

Phone camera picture

       We were so glad we were brave enough to do it, and that Kaitlyn could take pictures for us. Once we were down, we wandered through the rest of the park taking lots of pictures but not riding any more rides - they were fairly expensive.

    
       We didn’t even do the famous ferris wheel because it was 11 Euros! So as the sun was setting we finally headed for home after the longest, best day of our trip so far… Needless to say, I had no problem sleeping like a baby that night (or any night for that matter).

Day 3 - May 18th - St. Stephen's Cathedral and Stadt Park

        We met the group at the center of the city, Stephensplatz, around 11am, then we went through St. Stephen’s Cathedral. It was very colorful when we went in, vibrant blue, purple, and pink.

         Then I looked up and realized all the windows, even the stained-glass ones, were covered with bright blue and pink cellophane, and that there were club/dance-like electric lights mounted up on the high wall - weird.

       After we walked around there for a little while, we walked past the oldest church in Vienna

      
    on our way to the canal where there’s some cool street art and graffiti while we waited for the    right time for our catacomb tour. We also got gelato there, which was wonderful.

        Then we went back and took a tour through the catacombs (sorry, no pictures allowed). They were very creepy and ollllldddd. Kaitlyn was freaked out more by the coffins of recent-ish bishops and stuff than of the ancient stacked bones of Black Plague victims. At first we walked around some Habsburg coffins and sarcophagi, then we went to the part of the catacombs where whole skeletons were laying haphazardly in pits and rock floors, having been tossed there when so many died at the same time of the plague. After one room was full, they bricked it up and started on another, gross…. When we emerged from the land of the dead, we took on the challenge to climb four-hundred stairs to the middle of the tallest tower. I very nearly died…. no joke. The stairs were so narrow and winding tightly and neverendingly. People coming down would try to flatten themselves against the outer wall so we could try to squeeze past on the inner column. My legs and lungs were burning so badly I didn’t think they’d last much longer. At the top there was a gift shop (it just occurred to me that they would have to haul all that gift shop crap up there by climbing those awful narrow steps, and the worker there would have to climb it every dang day - yikes! unless there’s another entrance, which is entirely possible), and the view was incredible.

This is before we started climbing, we were completely unaware of the terrifying ordeal before us..... :)

         

         On the way down, someone was trying to pass us on their way up, so I was on the extreme inside and my feet slipped out from under me. Thankfully, we were at the part where there’s a little room off to the side, so there was a small landing with a railing around it. I was holding onto the railing from below and was hanging by just my hands for a second, it was slightly terrifying. 

        

After surviving our climb

        
          After we all came down, we took the U-bahn to the Nascht Market where they sell a bunch of touristy stuff like scarves, bags, clothes, sunglasses, jewelry, wall sheets, etc, as well as a food section where they sell basically everything. Alan brought us here so we’d know how to get there for the flea market on Saturday morning, which is something we were all excited to see. We walked through it all, then bought some food. I got my first Doner Kebab, and it was really good. We ate in a cute little grass-less park/courtyard thing, then we just sat there and talked for a while.

          After eating, we walked to Stadt Park and to the Johann Strauss statue/monument. It’s pretty famous.

    

Also, there was a lot of PDA going on here...

           We talked to an older guy dressed up in old-fashioned clothes selling tickets to the opera or a concert that night. He was really interesting to talk to. He was funny and liked to talk a lot, he even spoke some Mandarin to Nicole.

          After that, we walked around a little more and met some slack liners in a park close by. Lori likes slack lining, so we all stopped and she did that a few times. After that, we went our separate ways, and we hostel girls went exploring around St. Stephan’s to a Navajo Indian store and to an awesome grocery store where I got some delicious Milka chocolate bars, Pringles, cashews, etc, so I could survive every day without eating regularly since we have much more important things to do than keep a regular schedule. Then we headed home and eventually  went to bed…. sort of. These girls stay up until all hours of the night!!