Day Four: Vienna, Austria

Here's a riddle for you all: what's scarier than a German woman yelling at you to wake up?

Answer: nothing.

We woke up to an angry German train employee banging on the door of our sleeper car, yelling at us to wake up. Of course, the door was stuck, so even though we were up and trying to open it, she kept yelling. It probably goes in the top five most frightening moments in my life. She was extremely rude towards us and told us to get out of our room so she could strip the sheets. When we asked her where we were supposed to go since we were on a train (with no lounge or common area), she said " I don't know". We ate the rolls given to us for breakfast and gladly got off the train and arrived in Vienna.

We took the metro from the train station to our hostel and arrived around 8am. We weren't scheduled to check in until 2pm, but the hostel was kind enough to rearrange our booking and gave us a room that was ready immediately. We got to our room (which was really nice and had a private bathroom- score!) and took a quick nap since the overnight train wasn't the best sleep we'd ever had.

Around 11am, we ventured to a tour we had booked at the Alt-Weiner Schnapps Museum. We just so happened to walk in at the same time as an enormous tour group of old Swedish people... We were the only ones in the room under 70. We were taken into a room with lots of machinery and learned about each of the products offered. The tour guide was the great-grandson of the company's founder, and he was vey funny. After he talked to us for about 25 minutes, we got unlimited tastings of the products he'd just showed us. The ones I tasted we're very good and smooth. The owner said that they use high-quality ingredients and distillation processes to ensure that their drinks don't burn going down. My favorite was a flavor with flakes of 23 karat gold in the drink- the owner told us that gold is actually good for you (in small amounts, obviously). The best part about the whole tour was that we didn't even have to pay! We hung around for a whole after we were done to see where we were supposed to give our 6 euros, but I think they thought we were part of the Swedish bus group and we got to do the whole thing for free.

After that we went to the city center and walked around a bit, wandering in and out of a handful of gorgeous churches. It was such a relief to see that Vienna wasn't nearly as expensive as Switzerland (or Paris). After a few hours of wandering, we finally arrived at the Imperial Palace of the Hapsburg dynasty. We bought tickets and walked around for a couple of hours, admiring the lavish decor and amazing history. Our feet were sore from all of the walking, so we went back to the hostel and rested for half an hour before heading out. We stopped by the opera house and bought standing-room tickets for that night's performance and headed to dinner to kill some time. We went to an authentic Austrian restaurant and got fabulous weinerschnitzel. I had never had weinerschnitzel before, but I loved it! They were so big that they didn't even fit on the plate, but we all ate every last bit. We got some gelatto after and headed back to the opera house to see a performance of Werther. After that, we headed back to the room and went to sleep. Our day was so jam-packed that I fell asleep within 5 minutes of laying down and slept through the entire night.

Picture: the owner of Alt-Weiner explaining his products to us

Liebevoll,

Katie