Vienna

We caught a train to Vienna at 3:30 pm on Janaury 1st. We got to Vienna around 7:30 and took the metro to our hostel, which was huge and nice but out in some really boring suburb. Nothing was open that Sunday evening. We took a bus to a main street. The only place that was open was a Chinese restaurant so we went there and had some really good food. The town was dead and we tried to walk home, we went a little bit out of the way but we eventually found our way back. The room was nice, four bunks and spacious but it was hot and smelled of body odor. Three other guys were sleeping in there. I showered for the second time on the trip – I’m not keeping to a daily shower schedule.

The next day we walked all around Vienna. The ground was covered in a good layer of snow and it snowed for an hour or two in the morning and then as it started to warm up the snowfall turned into sleet and then turned into rain. It never stopped raining all day long. Everything turned to slush. We were never completely dry for the rest of the day. We saw a bunch of governent buildings (the Parliament building was the coolest), a huge church, statues of Mozart and others, and then we stopped for coffee and warmed up, then went to a chocolate store where we got some banana covered chocolate bars. They looked good but tasted really gross, it was a gooey, processed banana paste inside a thin coating of chocolate. We saw the huge cathedral, Stephensdom, more statues and later we went to a deli/bakery and got a tasty sandwich and a little pizza. We took the U-bahn to the huge palace on the westside of the city, the Schönbrunn. It was a huge building with all the old rooms set up they way they were when the Hapsburg royal family lived there. It was a lot more walking around but we were glad to be inside and we learned a lot from the handheld audio guides. We went back to the center of the city and got bread, meat, cheese and drinks at a grocery store. There was no where dry to eat – we walked around forever until we found a bench in a park. We ate huddled over our food to keep it dry. Our hands were frozen after finishing the food… so we got some coffee and apple strudel at a coffee shop and warmed up again. The coffee was huge and really good – especially Charlie’s white mocha.

So after the world-class Viennese coffee we went to the Staadstoper Opera house for a world-class opera. We got in line for the standing room tickets. The wait was less than an hour and we were sheltered from the rain. The 3.50 euro tickets that we were hoping to get were sold out when we got to the ticket window… so we went for the two euro tickets. Then it was 90 cents for the coat check. So the whole thing cost the two of us 5.80 euros. It was the best bargain ever. We got inside well before the opera started, so we wandered around the building and lost track of time. When we went to get our standing spots we could only get ones at the end of the horseshoe-shaped theatre. We were in the 5th level balcony (the very top), almost directly above the orchestra pit. I didn’t know what to expect, I had never seen an opera before. The orchestra played a couple songs, and then the opera started. The volume of the actors voices and the acoustics of the building was impressive – every word was loud and clear, even though we couldn’t understand anything because they were singing in Italian. Luckily every seat (or non-seat like ours) had a little screen that displayed the lyrics in whatever language you choose. The opera, “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” – “The Sevillian Barber,” was about a young man who falls in love with a young women but her over-bearing father, who is a barber in Sevilla, won’t let her date anyone and they have to find ways to secretly communicate with each other and they plot against the father and he tries to discredit the guy. Anyways, it was good and there was a lot of humor in it too. We finally went to bed after a long day.