Vienna, Austria - October 11 through October 14, 2008

Tiled roof of Stephansdom, Vienna

In celebration of Annie's birthday we took a week off and headed to Austria. Our Austrian adventure began in Vienna, continued to Salzburg and then ended in Innsbruck. The trip turned out to be one of our favorite holidays in Europe and we would highly recommend any of the places we visited.

3+

1. Coffee & Sweets. Vienna is famous for its cafes and for good reason. After a day of sightseeing it is great to sit and relax with a coffee (or a melange for Annie!) and one of the many delicious desserts. More to come on the cakes/pastries in Austria in Annie's food post, but needless to say they are amazing.
2. Vienna is simply a beautiful city with highly decorated and grand buildings. Just wandering the streets admiring all the buildings is a pleasure in itself. There are also a number of museums and residences to visit. Stephandsom (St. Stephen's Cathedral) is one of the most popular sights with it's colored, tiled roof. Make sure to walk the entire way around the Cathedral to see the different themes of tiles. For a museum, we chose to visit The Belvedere to see the Gustav Klimt paintings and enjoy the gardens. Two other places we enjoyed visiting were The Hofburg Complex and the Neues Rathaus (City Hall). The windows of the Neues Rathaus were adorned with flower boxes, giving the Neo-Gothic building a very cheerful facade.
   
3. The people. While they may not be outwardly friendly they were always very helpful and accommodating of our terrible/non-existent German speaking ability. We found this to be true everywhere we went on our trip, not just in Vienna, and it was a definite plus.

Upper Belvedere, Vienna

Hofburg, Vienna

Neues Rathaus, Vienna

3-

1. The sights are somewhat expensive. While you can get the Vienna Card which gives discounts at sights across the city, the card doesn't seem to be much of a savings. Because the card only offers you discounts at sights (not free entry) you need to visit a large number of sights to make up the €18.50 cost. The only thing we paid entry for was the Belvedere (Upper and Lower) and that alone was €25 for the both of us.
   
2. In Rome there are the gladiators outside the Coliseum, harassing you for pictures. The Viennese equivalent are the people dressed like Mozart stationed at every tourist or semi-touristy site. While they don't hassle you quite as much as the gladiators in Rome, they are a nuisance.
   
3. There are many obstacles to contend with when crossing the street: cars in the normal car lanes, cyclists in the bicycle lanes and trams in the tram lanes. Once, we were given the green man to cross a large road and we came very, very, very close to getting run over by a tram coming around a bend. Luckily Eddie looked over in time for us to hurl ourselves out of the way! We don't know if the trams don't have to stop at red lights like the cars but this one sure didn't! We were forever paranoid about crossing any streets after that incident.