Vienna in a Day

Kira and I got on a night train in Feldkirch, Austria (close to Liechtenstein) on Sunday night, and by Monday morning we were in Vienna! We spent the day in Vienna then hopped on another train to Salzburg, where we are now.

 

In Vienna!

 

The night train was pretty cool, we figured it out and actually got a fair amount of sleep. I think now that we know the seats fold down we'll get more sleep next time, but the conductor clued us in around midnight so we still did pretty well. The economy class cars are divided into compartments of six seats each, and we were lucky enough to share ours with only one other girl so we could fold down all the seats and sleep across two each. It was actually fairly comfortable until we had to fold them up as commuters got on near Vienna.

Once off the train we stopped quickly in a McDonald's for the free wifi (no purchase required, yay!) and while Kira assured her family that she is indeed alive I did some quick googling and mapping and we had a plan! With our snapshots of google maps and a willingness to get lost if need be, we headed off into the city.

Between our arrival at 7:15am and our departure at 4:20 we saw the Nashmarkt (a long-standing food etc market a lot like the Pike Place market in Seattle), the state opera house (populated with guys in Mozart costumes trying to sell us tickets), the main shopping streets and plazas, St. Stephens cathedral, the Hofburg Imperial Palace, the site of the Spanish Riding School (closed on Mondays, but really expensive anyway), the Hofburg's summer palace on the river, the Danube river itself (really cool steer art there, we didn't miss the real art museums), and a very beautiful Park that included some really nice rose gardens and a replica of the Parthenon. It also rained on us intermittently, so we got to duck into some fun cafés for tea, gelato, or lunch depending on the timing.

 

Hofburg Imperial Palace

 

Cathedral. 

 

Kira at our outdoor Danube-side art gallery.

 

A particular highlight for us athletic nerds was accidentally running into the Austrian Olympic team during their pre-travel photo op behind the palace. Most people don't go back there so we were very surprised to something so cool!

Olympians!

I'll fix the pictures when I get to a real computer (edit: did it!). For now, off to Salzburg!

Love Katie