Vienna, Austria

The first city in our trip!

Vienna is gorgeous! We arrived by plane (obviously), hopped on the train to the city and we were downtown in minutes. When we packed our bags we were most concerned about keeping the weight of our backpacks to under 45lbs to avoid the extra fees; however, we really should have worried more about making our bags as light and comfortable as possible, as the 5k walk from the station to our hostel was not very comfortable with 35lb bags that haven't been broken in yet. Once we got to our hostel (The Happy Hostel) we dropped off our bags and explored the city. We checked out the Schonobrunn first. The Schonobrunn is the Austrian response to the Versaille; a beautiful palace with well manicured gardens and parks. We took full advantage of the Schonobrunn gardens by laying in the park and catching up on some sleep.

Vienna has a really cool market along one of its main boulevards with shops and outdoor restaurants in the middle of it. We grabbed a nice meal there.

In our second day of Vienna we walked the whole city. We saw the huge old churches, concert halls, huge old churches, parliament, huge old churches, the Spanish Riding School, huge old churches, the national museum, and lots more. At night we saw the opera 'Madama Butterfly' at the Vienna Opera House. Even though I'm not an opera guy, it was cool to attend.

We capped the day in Vienna with some traditional Viennese food; Blunzengrostl and Kalbsrahmgulasch. Since the menu was completely in Austrian we ate our food blindly. When we got back to our hostel we checked out what we ate; clotted blood with potatoes and veal, yumm.

You can check out our full Picasa album here.