My last weekend trip, to Vienna with Allison. Neither of us did much research for this trip, I brought my travel book like I always do but I wasn't as motivated as I usually am to pack everything I can into a weekend. We left Friday night and found our hostel pretty easily. Meininger hostel, my mom's maiden name is Deininger, crazy. We had pastries for breakfast Saturday morning and headed to the main part of town. We wandered around a food market, reminiscent of La Mercat de Boqueria in Barcelona, though less impressive. After that we visited Stephansdom, St. Stephen's Cathedral. Four months later and I'm still not tired of big old churches, they're just incredible. This one was decked out with visages of saints. We followed the sound of a band to a courtyard of the Hofburg and took in a few marches, it took me back to marching band days, except these were cute old German-speaking men and not highschoolers. We took a long walk in a big circle through the city next, taking pictures of impressive buildings along the way. It got hotter and hotter the more we walked. We ended up back at the Hofburg, the Imperial Palace. The tour includes the silver collection, Sisi museum and the palace itself. The silver collection is pretty much a multitude of dishes and silverware that the royal family used throughout the years. They had a LOT of dishes, lemme tell ya. The Sisi museum is dedicated to Empress Elisabeth, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph. She needed some major psychiatric attention, the whole museum was about how she couldn't handle all the public attention or royal duties and was so sad because she wasn't free. She was also incredibly beautiful and spent a huge amount of time maintaining her beauty, hairdressers spent three hours doing her ankle length hair every morning and she was 5'8" and weighed about 100 pounds, she had a 20 inch waist, which is RIDICULOUS! By the end of this part of the museum, I was thoroughly annoyed with Sisi, she needed to just suck it up and get over it, seriously. She ended up being assassinated by some crazy anarchist while on vacation, he stabbed her in the chest and she didn't even realize it, she just collapsed later. The actual palace portion wasn't too impressive after Madrid and Versailles. It wasn't as old either, Franz Joseph reigned in the mid-1800s. Overall, the Hofburg was cool, but not my favorite thing I've seen in Europe. After getting through the museum we went out for coffee. Vienna is basically the home of fancy coffee, but a 16 oz Starbucks is probably a better value, a 16 oz Caribou is definitely a better value. I had a Turkish coffee, it was odd, just hot water mixed with coffee grounds I think and a gelatin cube, I didn't know what to do with it. After this another pastry for dessert and it was time to get in line for the opera. The only thing I really wanted to do in Vienna was go to the opera, you can get a standing section ticket for 4 euro. When you have the chance to see an opera for 4 euro, you take advantage of it. This does involve a long wait in line and you do have to stand through the entirety of the opera, but it's so worth it, at least I think so. Allison wasn't too thrilled about the long wait and wasn't excited about the opera like I was. I tried to keep us entertained with hangman and drawing and whatnot, the wait wasn't that bad. The opera was Tosca by Giacomo Puccini. Basically, Tosca and Mario are lovers, when Mario harbors an escaped political prisoner at their beach house, Scarpio (the bad guy) makes her think he's having an affair and uses her to lead him to the prisoner. They capture Mario but can't find the prisoner, so they torture him to black mail Tosca into revealing the location of the prisoner, which she does. This means death for Mario. Scarpio will let Mario live if Tosca will have an affair with him, of course she agrees to this and bargains for safe passage out of the city for her and Mario afterwards. After he writes up the safe passage, Tosca kills him. Tosca meets Mario before he is scheduled to be executed and tells him about the safe passage but they have to pretend to execute him first for appearances' sake. Shocker, they actually execute him and shout how they're coming for Tosca but she jumps off the building before they can catch her...it was an abrupt ending. There were 3 acts, Allison left after the 1st. I thoroughly enjoyed it, if I lived in Vienna I would probably go to the opera every other week at least, for 4 euro too, that's less than a movie. After talking to a roommate at the hostel, we decided to go to Schloss Schonbrunn the next morning for its hedge-mazes. We didn't actually go inside the palace. It was crazy hot and sunny, felt like August. We wanted to go to the zoo but it was a bit too pricey so we just walked around the palace grounds, they're very extensive. Eventually we made our way back to the center of town to see the uhrenmuseum, the clock museum. It's free on Sundays and Allison's dad own a clock shop, how relevant. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was a nice escape from the heat and the clocks were neat. I wanted to find the gold statue of Strauss afterwards, it's in a park and it just so happened that they were having some kind of food festival. The entire park was filled with booths selling cheese, cured meat, ready to eat food, beer and wine. It was really nice, Allison had a glass of wine and I had a glass of beer and we just relaxed for a little while. A cone of gelato later we were ready to make our way to the airport for our 5:55 flight. By the time we checked in and went through security our flight was delayed to 6:50. We went to the cafe in the terminal for a while and occupied ourselves, then our flight was delayed to 8:30. We decided to exit the terminal and look around the rest of the airport in hopes of finding an asian restaurant. No such luck, we ate at a generic airport restaurant instead. We went back through security and still had to wait a while. When it was finally time to board they informed us that we had a different plane and seating was a free for all, meaning our first row seats were now gone. The plane was unmarked, just white and it was some airline I've never heard of. Oh well, we got home safely, 3 hours later than expected, but safe. And that was my last weekend trip, I can't believe I'm coming home so soon, I really need to start packing but I have finals to study for first...something I should be doing right now, ugh. I wish I had more time (and money) for travelling, but it's been a great semester and I've seen a grand total of 14 countries and grown as a person immensely. I really do feel like there's a world of possibilities at my feet, who knows what the future will bring. Try to live with no regrets and take everything as it comes.
See you in 5 days.
-Lauren :)
No comments:
Post a Comment