Travel Tuesday: Vienna – Austria Part 1

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Well firstly apologies for the
massive lack of posts recently. I totally buried myself in my uni work these
last few weeks. But now my dissertation has been handed in and I am
(relatively) free again! Yay! (Well except for those pesky exams…)

So travel tuesday is here again, so now I’m onto my third stop in my inter-railing in Europe section. This is our stop in Vienna, the capital of Austria. Following on from our stop in Cesky Krumlov – Czech Republic. 

Hopefully from this point on I will have more of my own photos and not have to use some of my travel buddy’s ones, Although obviously Vienna and my camera didn’t get on too well…

The journey out of Cesky Krumlov wasn’t
too bad, although entirely uphill this time which was rather tiring. We spent
the morning wandering around the town and finishing our present shopping,
heading to the train station in the afternoon.
With an hour and 40 minutes to wait for
our train we got rather cold on the platform, only to realise shortly before
the train got there that there actually was a waiting room. Note to self, check
more thoroughly next time…
Spending a lot of time in train stations
is never particularly fun, but they normally have somewhere you can sit and
somewhere you can get food or drink. It’s really important to make sure you
keep an eye on your belongings at all times, a lot of train stations are known
as hotspots for pickpockets because there are large numbers of disorientated tourists.
So keep all your zips closed (and locked if you can) and make sure your valuables
aren’t on show.
One thing we seemed to come across quite
often on our trip was building works. They always seem to be in whichever
places you want to visit. I guess that is sod’s law though.
Our plan for Vienna wasn’t very specific,
we had a few places we wanted to see, and we wanted to get apple strudel
(again). So we just started wandering into town with our map we picked up from
information. First stop was Schönbrunn palace, but we’d started heading in a different
direction to start with so it was slightly cross-country in the end.
It seemed every time we opened our map we
would be asked if we wanted any directions, very helpful, and the locals seem
to know some tips as well. We ended up getting the U-Bahn (their underground
system) on the advice of the locals, and it brought us out just outside the
palace. A very impressive building (see my photo at the beginning of the post)
 
We also got to visit our first Christmas market
=) We almost managed to avoid buying anything but then the ‘spiral-kartoffeln’
caught my eye. Spiral potato chips, very tasty indeed.
After the palace we resumed our quest for
Apfel-strudel, and ended up in a very posh cafe-restaurant which we joked would
be a perfect place for a James Bond film. But it had a pretty good strudel,
although the prices in Vienna aren’t quite as cheap as we experienced in the
Czech Republic.
Our evening sightseeing was to visit the
Rathaus (town hall) as this has the biggest Christmas market in Vienna. It is
slightly more commercialised than some of the others, but it’s very magical. We
had mugs of hot punch as we walked round the market (you paid a deposit for the
mug, so you could keep it if you wanted) and Kartoffel-puffer which are potato
pancakes. Probably one of the best things about central Europe, if it wasn’t
quite so unhealthy I think I could live off of them… However we also had
Langos, which was a fried bread, definitely nowhere near as good, far too
greasy. Putting us in mood for salad for dinner, we needed something healthy.
 

Well that’s it for now, but I will carry on with Vienna in my next post 🙂

Nikki
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2 thoughts on “Travel Tuesday: Vienna – Austria Part 1

  1. Pingback: Travel Tuesday! Inter-railing in Europe | Beads and Barnacles

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