The Vienna Recap

Since I haven't blogged since first arriving to Vienna, I thought I'd give a short recap of the adventure before going onto the new topic: Venice (my current location).

After settling into our room, we made our way down to the city center and ate at some place called Shanghai Resturant and had chicken in oyster sauce and a Chinese beer. They also treated us to some gluhwein (umlaut that "u" though). It is my new favorite autumn drink; the warm wine tastes like a sweet, spicy cider. We headed back to our room and that was the end of day one.

Day two we had a couple of things on our "to see" list: the Hundertwasserhaus, the Riesenrad, and the Haus der Meeres (the aquarium). We found the Hunderwasserhaus with a little trouble but it was astonishing. We even ate in a cafe in the complex to experience the oddness of the architecture. While walking to the Riesenrad, we also found the Kunst Haus Wien (Vienna Art House) and took pictures of it (Ann Leibovitz had an exhibition there and she's not one of my favorites). About 10 minutes later we made it to the Prater Garten and found the Riesenrad (giant wheel... so obviously a farris wheel). Finally, we found our way to the Haus der Meers, an old World War II bunker with a sign on top saying, "In the dark of the night, all smashed to pieces" (or it was something like that). The aquarium was about 5 floors of not only fish, but reptiles, insects, and amphibians as well. They even had a large tank full of koi fish that you could touch. I had my hand in cold water for about ten minutes and touched a couple. After that, we did a little wandering around and some shopping (I bought a new scarf and kept drooling over a 200 Euro pair of Armani sunglasses). The end of day two.

Day three, we had to check out by ten and then we ran off to our train station to see if maybe they had lockers for our luggage so we could run around all day with nothing to worry about. Turns out our train station did not (Vienna has three train stations). So we ran to one of the larger stations and threw our luggage in there. We visited the Schloss Schonbrunn (umlaut the "o" in "schon," please) and the Tiergarten ("animal garden" = "zoo"). I love going to zoos in foreign countries because they seem more relaxed about the rules. In the Monkey House, they had a couple of small monkeys that ran around loose and you could touch them (as long as you were careful... we saw one women get bit). But the best part was the bat cave. We weren't sure if we could go in, but it was a large cave with bats flying all around you, no glass or anything. It was terrifying and at the end proclaimed that I knew why Bruce Wayne became Batman. We then decided to do one last thing and visit the Nasch Market (just a big, open-air market). I had baklava and gluhwein and all was perfect in the world.

We had a small snag in finding our train to Venice because it turned out our train split in Salzburg and we didn't know what that was in German, so we were a little confused. Then, there was some issue with a beds in our compartment (language issues: Japanese, English, Italian, and German all being thrown around), but all was setteld and now we're here... well, we've been here for a good bit.

Until later, cheers.