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So, a cou­ple of week­ends ago I went to Vienna, and it was great. It was more of a low key trip, did more and drank less for once. We took the stu­dent agency bus, it wasn’t as long of a bus ride as Budapest, maybe about five hours or so. We stayed at the Wom­bat hos­tel, which is located at the end of the main shop­ping street in Vienna, a street most women I know would kill to shop at. I was more impressed with the donairs.

Don­airs, 3 Euro

The hos­tel was fan­tas­tic, it was very clean, and very mod­ern. When we walked in, we awoke a sleep­ing Korean man, who was star­tled by our entrance. Hora and I talked to him, and it turns out he was in Vienna for the Inter­na­tional Atomic Energy con­fer­ence! The first thing I thought to ask was “What the hell are you doing in a hos­tel?”. But I guess sci­en­tists don’t make as much these days. The beds were very com­fort­able, more so then my own bed at the Kolej. This hos­tel had a great bar in the base­ment, on the first night we went down and ended up play­ing foose­ball with the bar ten­der, who had the key to the machine and kept the ball rolling all night. He was pissed of when he lost though, it was Greg and I vs Hora and him.

Hos­tel

Dur­ing the day we went explor­ing, and it was very dif­fer­ent from Prague in a lot of ways. The city was quite a bit more mod­ern look­ing in the main down­town, the build­ings not quite as old as Prague. Another thing about the city was that it was it was more spaced out, much less cramped then Prague, although I’m not sure if thats a good thing, they def­i­nitely didn’t get the most out of the land, but it was a nice change. We walked down the main shop­ping dis­trict to get to the main down­town core. Once we got there, there was a ton of build­ings to take a look at, most of them we’re pretty cool.

Some cas­tle I thought looked nice

Later on that night, we went to a Hukka bar and smoked some fla­vored tobacco with the rest of the stu­dents who were on this trip from the dorm. Appar­ently there is a large Turk­ish pop­u­la­tion in Vienna, so these kinds of bars are quite com­mon. We also had some beers and just chilled out.

Chillin’ at a Hukka bar

The next day, it was an amaz­ingly sunny day, the first time I’d walked out­side in Europe with just a t-shirt, and it was about damn time. We walked to Schon­brunn Palace, which is the palace that Kaiser Franz Joseph lived in. This palace was absolutely enor­mous, so big that it had its very own zoo inside, and it wasn’t just some small zoo. We spent almost all day at this palace, both inside and out.

All the land in this pic­ture is part of the palace, not even close to the total amount

Huge bat

Ran­dom cool lookin’ fish

Later on in the night, I went out with the stu­dents to a bunch of bars, and I wanted to go to the main bar dis­trict called Bermuda Tri­an­gle, but no one else wanted to go. I was fine with it because I fig­ured I’d go out there myself the next day and meet some ran­dom Ger­mans, but lit­tle did I know that Vienna prac­ti­cally shuts down on Sun­day, almost no bars were open… Oh well, I know the next time I go to Vienna.

One of the bars we went to, the sign says “Put your phone in your ass”. Dou­ble you tee eff.

The next day was the night I found out the Bermuda Tri­an­gle was closed, but we did find a dif­fer­ent cool bar, and it was play­ing hockey! It was the play­offs for a Aus­trian team, the hockey def­i­nitely wasn’t NHL cal­i­bre, but it was fun to watch none the less.

Pub

The next day we had to check out at 12, so we packed our bags and headed on over to an amuse­ment part that was beside the bus sta­tion. The way it worked was a lot dif­fer­ent from the PNE. Basi­cally, you don’t have to pay to get in, you walk in for free, and you pay for each indi­vid­ual ride set by the com­pany who leased the plot of land on which they build their ride. Each ride was four to five Euros, but most of them were worth it, espe­cially this one in particular:

I also enjoyed this one, it was a com­bi­na­tion of the swings and the hellevator:

I got a pretty good view of the city from up there

After­words, we kind of ran out of money, so we went explor­ing until our bus came. We walked across a bridge that leads us to more of a residential/industrial area of Vienna, which was pretty cool because we found a ran­dom Microsoft con­fer­ence where they were going to talk about Win­dows 7. We took a cou­ple fly­ers and watched them set up, but unfor­tu­nitely it started when our bus came…

Over­all I had a great time in Vienna, it would have been nicer (espe­cially in the palace) if it was Spring, but it was still great. Good beers, inter­est­ing peo­ple, and great food, that’s a good com­bi­na­tion for a great city. I ate at least 10 don­airs, I kind of went to town in that coun­try when it came to food, sig­nif­i­cantly more then I spent in Copen­hagen, which was after this trip, but that blog post will have to wait for another day. To see the rest of my pic­tures, go here:

Vienna Album

Ran­dom graffiti