Day 1

After catching up on our sleep for about 11 hours, we were off to the downtown area of Vienna. We took the train to the U-bahn (underground subway) and the U-bahn to Stephanplatz. We walked around the St. Stephan’s Cathedral, which was undergoing a “cleaning” on one side, but was still a beautiful building. We continued to walk around down town and looked through our guide book to find a café where we could eat lunch, Ben picked one out and we were on our way. When we arrived at the Café Frauenhuber, it was very quiet and we took our seat. Ben started telling me about the history of that café, and explained that this was a café where Mozart had performed concerts! We were sitting in the café where over 200 years ago, Mozart was playing for the guests! That was pretty exciting to know, so Ben and I sat and ordered coffee (which was delicious by the way, and came with little chocolates) Ben ordered soup and salad, where I ordered a more Austrian dish of Lentils with Bacon and White Bread Dumplings (I can’t remember the name of the dish “auf Deutsch”), but it was all delicious! Then when we left the waiter gave us a pamphlet, and we read more of the history of the café, and apparently it was also the place where Mozart made his last public appearance as a pianist. Very cool.

After our lunch we walked around the city some more going through the Hofeburg Complex, which used to be the Kaiser’s Palace. We “oohed” and “awed” and the beauty of the buildings that made up the beautiful palace, then we did the Schatskammer museum where we saw the Royal Jewels, robes, and other famous Christian relics like the “Holy Lance”-the spear that is believed the be the spear that pierced Jesus’s side while on the cross. Pretty neat stuff if you ask me.

For the rest of the day we really just walked around finding other things to do. Example, we found a few Starbucks in Vienna, so of course I had to stop and get something! I got a caramel frappacino took some pictures, then we walked around some more. Since we’re going to be living here we also took advantage of the U-bahn and basically just rode around for a little while, trying to familiarize ourselves with the stops and everything. We went back to downtown Vienna, and wanted something quick, easy and cheap for dinner, so what did we have? McDonald’s of course! Just to say that we’ve had McDonald’s in Vienna, and it wasn’t too bad. After that we took the train back to our hotel room and have been relaxing for most of the evening. Not a bad first full day here if you ask me!