On Monday and Tuesday this week, we hit up the fine city of Vienna (Wien) in Eastern Austria. We packed up and left Linz around 10AM. We got to the train station about 15 minutes before the train was set to leave. We didn’t check ahead, so it was good timing. We made it up to the platform and waited around. The time went quickly. We even had a little floor show:
That mouse lives under the snack machine. We hopped on the train and rode the 1:45 to Vienna. Our first order of business was to get some food. We hadn’t eaten much and it was already past 1! We went past the hostel where we’d spend the night, then found a little Italian place on our way to the tourist stuffs. We were outside looking at the menu when the proprietor came out and pulled us in. He was a funny man. We ordered, then got a surprise. Most pizzas here are for a single person. The one I got was a little… larger:
Both Mary Jo and her pasta were surprised. You’ll also notice a cooked egg on there. I nearly had a repeat of the France incident. Fortunately is was a very well done egg. After much huffing and groaning, I managed to get that thing down.
Mary Jo seems oddly pleased as well. I was pretty stuffed.
The guy that ran the place came over to give us our bill and asked where we were from. We told him the US. He seemed very pleased! He squeezed my arm and said “Schwarzenegger”, then inquired if he was still governor. It was pretty silly.
Full of foodsies, we wandered down to the grand attraction: the royal palace, or Schönbrunn Palace as it would be known here. OK, Schloss Schönbrunn is more correct, but whatever. We got down there after more walking than we were expecting and started looking around. We were not prepared for what we found. This place is gigantic. We walked in quite a ways, then started looking through what would be the gardens, and after 15 minutes we finally caught a glimpse of the actual palace.
The funny thing is that we later found a map and discovered how much we had to cover. Over the course of the two days we were there, we saw maybe 1/2 of the place. Probably more like 1/3. Don’t expect to see everything in one day. This was also in winter when the trees and flowers aren’t doing much, and it’s just the palace chickens running about.
I’ve started using “chicken” as a generic word to label a common bird of an area. Crows are “palace chickens”, ducks are “river chickens”, pigeons are “city chickens”, and pheasants are “prairie chickens”.
Mary Jo seemed content enough walking through the snow.
The grounds are broken up so that main paths lead to stuff. Here’s a view of an obelisk at the end of the path.
We were standing right in the middle between the palace and that obelisk on a diagonal path, to give you an idea of the distance we’re talking about. Each middle point has a fountain. Of course in winter it’s all frozen. They don’t bother to drain them, but they do ask that you keep off the ice.
Even though nothing was in bloom, it was still neat to walk through snow covered paths.
Here’s that obelisk was saw earlier.
I’m not sure what was wrong with people back in the day, but they need to chill out with the sculptures. Just sayin’.
Although, some of them look pretty silly with snow on them.
Hehehe, she has a snow hat. We turned and made it to right in front of the palace. Here’s what it looks like without the normal greenery and flowers that are present in the more sane tourist months.
Directly in line with the palace is “Neptune’s Fountain”.
I think you can see why it’s called that.
We did some more walking about and managed to cover nearly 1/2 of the grounds. We still hadn’t actually entered a building, even though some look exactly like they should be in a fantasy movie of some sort.
At long last we made it to the palace building. Here’s a look at the Neptune Fountain and the other half of the grounds (up a big hill – a major reason we avoided them).
There’s some sort of big… thing up there that we didn’t get a chance to check out. It looks interesting though.
Before heading around to the front of the palace, I crammed Mary Jo in a little hut thing. Not sure why it’s there or what it does, but she’s sure cute standing in there.
Who’s that peeking out?!
We came around the side of the palace and discovered a surprising surprise. BAM! Christmas market with GIGANTIC tree!
This was a shared photo moment for sure.
This Christmas market is what Mary Jo was after. It had food and whatnot, but the shops were more about hand crafts than pre-made stuff. Mary Jo loved the toy stands. Yeah, plural.
They even had a donut stand that would take a donut, fry it, then fill it with cream right in front of you. They had a thing that they shoved the donut on then gave a few pumps to transfer the goo from a clear tank into the donut. It was pretty neat. There was a bunch of stuff there, simply because of the size of it.
We checked the place over, got some info on tickets to actually go into the palace, then headed out to the hostel. It was dark by this time, so I took a shot of the tree and palace all lit up.
On the way back to the hostel, we went by this awesome model shop. They had regular models and radio controller models. Planes, cars, boats, tanks, etc. They had a big plane in the window… like 6 feet across big. What really caught me though was the radio control boat with a crane to launch another radio controlled boat from the deck. That’s sick. We had to go past this place like 3 times. Each time I had to resist.
We got back to the hostel and got a look at our room. The only word I can use is “spartan”. It was nice though. We had a bed:
Two doors:
A table:
And a bathroom:
What more could you want?
We spent the evening in the bar using the super fast internet. It’s sad because by “super fast” I mean “normal to slow”. It was painful to leave. We watched a movie, then hit the hay preparing for the big day ahead. Check out Vienna (Day 2) for details. 😀
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