Vienna Day 2: "When in Vienna"

We woke up extremely late and caught a tram into the city center to meet Kerstin, an old friend from high school who lives in Vienna.  She showed us around the major sights, including the Hofburg and many large museums.  In fact, a lot of Vienna is very large, very pretty buildings.  The Hofburg itself is an imposing palace that takes up the equivalent of about two city blocks.  Kerstin then walked us through a big outdoor food market before having to leave us for a while to work on a project. 

We continued wandering and saw their Parliament and Town Hall.  Their Town Hall is an enormous place with an intricate church-like façade.  In front of their Town Hall was a circus/food fair going on so we stopped and tried out some fried dough and jam.  Then we went into the Treasury to see some interesting artifacts-the Roman Empire’s crown jewels, a unicorn horn, the Holy Lance, and the supposed Holy Grail! My favorite was definitely the 8 foot tall unicorn horn :) 

After freshening up at the “hostel”and clearing up some language barrier problems, we went back to the food festival outside the Town Hall for dinner.  Next we hopped onto a tram to the “Bermuda Triangle”, an area by the Danube channel full of small bars and a popular place to bar hop.  The first bar we went to was tiny but had a ton of cheap drinks to be drunk. There we met a bachelorette party that was selling small trinkets to help raise money for the wedding (or drinks? same difference).  I bought a cola flavored sucker for 1 Euro.  The next place we sat and relaxed for a while as the boys drank liters of beer, Viennafest style.

At that point we met up with Kerstin and her friends at a bar/club place nearby.  To be more specific, it was a big boat docked in the Danube channel. Oh yeah.  The main floor was a bar and the level below was a dance floor. The music in Vienna was incredible-they love their 80’s and early 90’s hits! We tried over and over again to request anything new and failed and failed and failed.  The scene was totally different than what we were used to in London but we had a blast partying with a bunch of Austrian kids. When in Vienna!

After miraculously finding out way back to the “hostel”, we caught a couple of hours of sleep and then took a train to Bratislava to catch our flight back to Londontown.

EUROTRIP=SUCCESS