On to Vienna

Greetings from Vienna! We arrived here today after a couple of days in Munich.

We only had one full day in Munich (yesterday) which was spent with a couple of friends of mine whom I knew from an online community I am part of, so despite knowing them for many years I had never actually met them. Anyhow, it turned out to be a lot of fun (and a lot of walking!). First we went to the Deutsche Museum, which was a big science museum and quite fun to go around. Some of the exhibits were a bit out of date - eg they showed a state-of-the-art 0.5MB memory card (the one in our camera holds 2,000 times more and cost less than 10 pounds). Then after a long walk, we arrived at the English Gardens and had a huge pretzel and some drinks at the famous beer garden there - I had the applewine as I had taken a liking to it back in Frankfurt.

Towards the end of the day we walked into the town centre again. We were shown a few famous locations relating to Hitler´s rise to power, before going onto the Höfbrouhous (almost certainly spelt wrong) which is another famous beer garden. Although it was obviously quite touristy, it also felt quite authentic too. It's hard to explain really...

Back to our hostel for the evening then; we had a bunk bed room to ourselves, all reasonable enough. We got a 9:27 train to Vienna, which was early but not too early. Arriving early afternoon (4 hours later) was really nice as it gave us time to chill out in the hostel until it got a bit cooler. Mainland Europe sure is noticeably warmer than UK, especially when you get further south! However unlike south Spain, it isn't relentlessly hot - the weather is varied and you do get cloudy or rainy weather from time to time. Anyhow, I digress...

We somehow managed to fit a fair bit in during the late afternoon & evening in Vienna. We went to the city centre and took a few pictures around, in and up the rather large St. Stephan's Cathederal (or church?). Then we wandered around Vienna a bit and came across magnificent building after magnificent building. It was amazing! There seems to be an entire chunk of the city just full of huge 18th or 19th century buildings, with a few older ones thrown in for good measure. After some "authentic" Vienna food, we went to a recommended ice-cream parlour, which was very nice :)

A word about our hostel - it's called the Wombat hostel, which is a rather silly name for sure, but it's living up to its reputation as one of the best hostel chains in the world. Very clean and welcoming, with very helpful and enthusiastic (but not TOO enthusiastic) reception staff. Internet, a bar, breakfast all available as well as a few nice extras. One bad point though is that the internet PC's don't let you plug things in, so we can't currently upload more of our lovely photos for you all to see :(

Tomorrow it's a day trip to Bratislava, where we again meet up with someone I know from online. Then two more full days in ienna before we go on to Venice. It's all very exciting :)