vienna, austria

When we arrived in Vienna, Mike's cousin Fred and his brother in law Oliver were waiting for us. Mike's cousin (from his dad's side this time) did the travelling around Europe thing like 15 years ago, and he met a girl here in Vienna and now this is where he lives! Oliver gave us a quick tour around town, and then we headed to Fred's apartment where we met his wife, Gueny. We got our things settled, then went into town with Oliver and Fred for some beer/wine and another little quick tour by foot. By then it was quite late, so we headed home and went to sleep.
We slept on the pull-out couch in the living room, and in the (early!) morning we were woken by their kids Carl (4 years old), and Matthias(2 years old) peeking around the corner at us and giggling. Fred and Gueny also have a 3 month old daughter named Lina. All three are so adorable! Carl and Matthias speak both English and German and we are so jealous of them! hahaah.. It's so cute, sometimes they will speak some German words and some English words in the same sentence. After breakfast we all headed to Shonbrunn, which was the Hapsburgs' Palace, and the Palace grounds and the surrounding park. It was a bit of a rainy day, but everything still looked so beautiful! We were going to go to the Zoo, but it was a holiday that day, and the lines to get in were crazy! Mike did a good job at getting Matthias and Carl all worked up at the park (and for some reason they started calling me Murphy, haha)

At the park we met Oliver again and he took Fred, Mike and I into the Vienna Woods where we went to this cafe that had a great view and had sachertorte (chocolate cake) and coffee, two things that Vienna is famous for. They were both delicious! Afterwards, we went to pick up Oliver's son, Phillip and we went for lunch at a heurigen (wine garden). There are all sorts of heurigen throughout the woods, each bottles their own type of wine from their vineyards out back; which equals low cost wine! Mike and I played it safe and ordered the chicken schnitzel, but Fred ordered chicken liver and Oliver ordered cow's tongue. I don't know how, but we ended up trying a bit of both of their dishes. The chicken liver was the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted, and I literally almost threw up. I really had to concentrate on keeping it down and breathing deeply after that. The cow tongue tasted surprisingly kind of like ham which was weird because it was beef! hmm.. The hardest part was getting over the mental fact that you were eating a piece of COW TONGUE. It actually looked like tongue on Oliver's plate too, you could tell it was a big fat tongue cut up into slices, tastebuds and everything. I wouldn't eat it again, but next to the chicken liver it tasted like the most heavenly candy you could imagine. That's how nasty the liver was!

That night they were celebrating Carl's birthday, so we went home and had some more cake! In the evening Fred took Mike and I back into town for a proper night tour and for some awesome gelato from a place called Zinoni's. We ended our tour in front of City Hall at the Rathaus Park. There is a huge screen and chairs set up there, where each night this month they show either an opera or a concert; two more things Vienna is famous for. It was free, which was awesome.. because a proper opera could be quite expensive. I can't remember what it was called at the moment, but we saw one of Mozart's operas.

The next day was another early morning, and Mike and I went into town on our own for a while. We first took the bus to Mariahilferstrasse which is a big shopping street where we bought blank DVDs to burn all of our pictures onto, and portable memory sticks so we can easily transfer things (like my blog and pictures!) from Mike's laptop to public computers if need be. I also bought some cat treats, because we are always running into stray cats and have nothing to coax them over with! lol..

After the shopping we went to the Belvedere Museum, which features works like The Kiss by Gustav Klimt and pieces by Egon Schiele. I don't know if I've just grown a better appreciation for art by now, but the Belvedere was probably my favorite art museum yet. There were a lot of really great pieces, but I didn't have my notebook with me to write down some of the artists' names. I tried to remember them best I could, but of course now I can't remember them! I'll have to google the museum later and try and get a listing of their collection. Fred met us at the museum once we were done, and he showed us the Hundertwasserhaus, which is this crazy, artistic multi-colored apartment building. Hunderwasser was an artist and he faught for each tenant to have the right to decorate the outside of their window, within one arm's length, any way they wanted. He has also designed other funky buildings around the world. Google him for a better idea or what his style was like! We then walked through another park, ending up at The Prater which is a huge amusement park. One of the ferris wheels there is quite famous, and was used in the film The Third Man. I didn't get a picture of it though because my camera battery died, dangit.

For dinner we went to a place called Centimeter, where you can order food like bread by, you guessed it, the centimeter! I was happy to see Radler on the menu, which is the type of beer I had at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich that has part lemonade in it. It tastes so good! We all had normal food this time, so there was no gagging, which is always nice.

This morning was a pretty lazy one. We have been soooo busy the last couple of days that we wanted to just take some time to relax and get some things done like burning our pictures to cd and blog! It's around 130am, and I've been working on the blog in bits all dang day. It really takes a lot of time, especially when you are 3 cities behind! hahaha.. Around 5 Mike and I tried giving the zoo another go, but it closed at 630 and even the ticket lady told us it wouldn't be worth it because we would be too rushed. That kinda sucked. I would have liked to see all the animals and this zoo is the oldest in Europe. It cost 10 Euros though, so it really wouldn't have been worth it to go for only one hour. Instead we went to Naschmarkt, which is this big outdoor market selling all sorts of trinkets and ethinc foods and spices. They were also closing up, but we still managed to see the whole thing. We then met Fred in front of St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is what the whole city is situated around. It was another beautiful chuch! There was another mass in progress, so we were only allowed in around the back area. We didn't really want to make it a late night, so then we just went to one of the famous cafes in the area, Cafe Diglas for some of their cake and coffee. I had this delicious chocolate banana cake and Mike had the sachertorte again.

I've really loved Vienna, and It's definitely one of my most favorite cities so far. There is such a great combination of beautiful old buildings, little cafes, great cultural things like operas and museums, and tons of big open green parks at the same time. It's a place I could picture myself living for a while or at least coming back and spending longer.

*Sigh* Well I think I'm pretty much caught up now! Yaaaay! These last 3 days have been CRAZY busy. Tomorrow morning we are catching a flight to Dublin, Ireland. I think we will spend around 1 week in Ireland then go on to Scotland and England. Jay is also in Ireland right now, and we are trying to arrange to meet up, probably on Saturday. He is near Belfast and is going to train down to Dublin I think. It'll be cool to see a familiar face from home!

<3 shanon