dancing the Viennese waltz

I've been so bad at updating since I got back to the states but I'm finally going to post about one of my trips: Vienna!

Vienna was in the middle of the whole trip so we'll skip the beginning and end for now and just pretend we dropped right into Vienna.

I'm not sure what I was expecting from Vienna, and there were several times where we thought that perhaps we should have done a touch more research before fumbling our way down there, but we were there and there was no excuse to do stuff.

During my whole two week sejour, the weather was beautifully sunny and at times, far too hot. This made Vienna an interesting place to be. I'd say there are about a hundred gardens in Vienna, and we spent a lot of time lazing around in them. There are also thousands of museums, but seeing as I'm not a big museum fan, it wasn't a big draw for me.

The city of Vienna is an interesting place. The city is rather large and spread out when you get down to it, but the center part is compact and mostly old palaces now converted in museums. The Hapsburgs were apparently a pretty big deal. It seems most of my history classes failed to mention them, though. Although, Marie-Antoinette was from Vienna (French connection! They're everywhere).

Vienna is also home to Austria's favorite composer(s): Strauss and Mozart, although Mozart is really from Salzburg, a story for another day. This basically means that there are statues of them around every corner. Strauss even has two while the original is under construction.

Vienna is also famous for coffee so we had to have a sit down in several cafes to try some. It also happened to be erdbeer season (aka strawberries) so I had this mountain of deliciousness:

Normally, I hate admitting that I'm a tourist, although I've gotten over this slightly in recent years (it's impossible to blend in in China, so you just have to give up), but I still like to draw the line somewhere. That line is usually those bus tours that you seem to find in every overly-touristy city. However, since I was not alone and we really had no idea what was in Vienna, I got talked into going. It was quite fun!

Notice our little foto-bomber driver in the background.

We saw all the major sights including a giant church in the middle of town, the Danube river which is blue but not as blue as the song leads you to believe, and lots of horse-drawn tourist carriages.

Highlights of Vienna:

1. The hot dog with cheese baked into the middle. Yummm.

2. European coca cola. So much better than others. Maybe because it comes in a glass bottle.

3. The crazy guy with a trumpet

4. Waiting five minutes for a segway tour to actually move so we could watch

5. Trying schnitzel finally and deciding it's totally not worth it

In conclusion! Vienna is cool but I think I prefer Munich. Perhaps I'll blog that next.

crazy trumpet guy.