Vienna is such a beautiful and interesting city. It is one of my favorite places so far, simply because there are so many sites, all of them equally beautiful and interesting, but the city is incredibly compact. You don’t need to travel across town to stay occupied for a day. Countless museums, churches, quaint restaurants and palaces are all within walking distance of each other. The architecture and design of each building has a rich history that is meticulously maintained. It is not at all difficult to imagine what the city looked like a hundred or two hundred years ago, because so little has changed.
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| The Art History Museum |
The trip was off to a rough start. We thought we would get to Vienna around 2:30, but thanks to a really painful German final, a forgotten passport (oops…) and about four delayed trains, we didn’t get in until after 4 p.m. Knowing that most things would close soon, we just checked into the hotel and wandered around the city. Vienna is absolutely beautiful at night, and felt completely safe, so we walked for quite a while. We stopped at St. Stephen’s Cathedral, Swarovski World for some Christmas presents and Starbucks for a little taste of home. Then we strolled past the Hapsburg palace and through all the small, quiet streets of Vienna.
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| Schönbrunn (back) and some gardens |
The next morning, we started out early and went to Schönbrunn Palace on the outskirts of Vienna. We spent hours there exploring the palace, gardens and apple strudel bakery. Yum ☺. The palace is very interesting and fairly similar to Versailles. The gardens and its decorations are picturesque and – if it was warmer then 50 degrees, I could have spent all day wandering around. Instead, we went back into the inner city and took a tour of St. Stephen’s catacombs then ate lunch at an Italian restaurant. We spent the afternoon planning the evening because Saturday night happened to be…
The Long Night of Museums! Once a year Austria has a night where you can buy a ticket for eleven euro that gives you entrance to most of the museums in the city between 6 p.m. and 1 a.m. Lucky for us, we just happened to be in Vienna during this time! We got our tickets and saw about seven museums before 11:30 when we decided we were too tired to keep going. It’s actually an extremely fun night. The museum district is busy with people trying to see as much as possible and many museums have special music and programs to add to the typical museum experience. There is one part of town called the Museum Quartier, where close to 10 museums share one large courtyard. Here there was a huge stage with constant live performances. There were also several outdoor restaurants/ bars set up and the whole courtyard was alive all night.
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| Line outside the Demel Museum |
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| Inside the Modern Art Museum |
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| MuseumsQuartier |
Early in the morning, we woke up, and came home a super long way – through Graz.
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