Goodbye Vienna

So tomorrow morning we leave Vienna. Our train (leaving from the other side of town) leaves at the ridiculously early time of 6:23am, meaning waking up before 5am. Erk! Still, it's a 7 hour train ride, so we get time to nap on the way.

So what have we been up to in Vienna? Well, quite a few things and also some rest. The biggest thing we did was to visit the Schonbrunn Schloss, which is a summer palace a little bit away from the centre of Vienna. I've been to Versailles, and it was very much like a smaller version of that - say about 30% smaller. It was enjoyable enough though I think the bit Rebecca enjoyed the most was the demonstration on how to make the local dessert, apple strudle :) Going around the maze, strolling around the grounds and the 40-room tour were all very enjoyable too. We'll be going to Versailles later in our travels too.

We've done quite a bit of strolling around and also resting our feet too... there's one heck of a lot of walking on this holiday and there's no way we could walk all day every day. Whilst resting today we sat down in the Cafe Demel, where we had Sacher torte, which apparently is a famous cake from these parts (though I had never heard of it) and has been the subject of legal battles in the past. It was indeed very tasty and very rich, though it did leave my tummy feeling quite funny for a few hours after.

Also, as previously mentioned, we went to Bratislava for a day. This was an interesting day out for sure, as Slovakia felt a very different country. It's had many different influences and has certainly been influenced more by Russia and communism than the rest of Europe we have visited has. Also the language is very different, with lots of y's and z's and accents that I had never seen before. We were both very grateful to the guy I knew from there who guided us round the city and showed us the sights. The castle was interesting, as was the longest asymetrical bridge in Europe. From the castle we could see the far side of the river, where massive amount of tower blocks had been built (a definite result of communist influences)... it was an incredible sight, never seen quite such a dense area of population before. We also went to the guy's house and played a board game, which is always nice :)

The guy also let us use his internet connection, so we have uploaded a few more photos now, up until half way through our day to Königstein, so only part of the way through our third day I'm afraid!

I think the hotel in Venice has internet, so we should be able to update you there as well.

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 :)