Vienna

The Alvarez siblings: Don´t we look like J.Crew models???

We arrived to Vienna’s West train station somewhere around 7:30 pm but our Vienna tour did not really start until Tuesday morning when we went for a walk of the historic city center. And just like every other tourist does we walked past the beautiful buildings of the Museumsquartier and the Imperial Palace until reaching the pedestrian zone with all of its shops, cafés, restaurants and the stunning St. Stephan’s cathedral. We entered several churches, listened to a pipe organ concert given at one of the churches, walked past the city park which is filled with statues of famous composers such as Strauss and Bethoven and ended the night with a delicious mélange (the Austrian version of a cortadito) and an even more delicious Sacher torte (a chocolate cake which has its origin in this city). The weather was nice and cool so we decided to walk back to our hotel for about 45 minutes and enjoy the stroll thru the lively Mariahilfe Str. with its many shops and restaurants. According to my brother we needed this walk in order to make the 10 kilometers of the day.

View of the Garden and "Die Glorietta" from the palace --- Vie of the palace from "Die Glorietta"

More pictures from the gardens of the Schönbrunn palace

During our stay in Vienna we also visited Scloss Schönbrunn: the summer palace of the Habsburg family. The gardens and fountains around the palace are so unbelievably beautiful that I can see why the emperor enjoyed visiting this place so much. After seeing the palace it was off to the Imperial apartments near the city center (the official residence of Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife Elizabeth a.k.a Sisi). In there we got a tour of different rooms inside the residence as well as a walk thru Sisi’s museum. Afterwards it was off to the Danube River to see a more modern Vienna with its skyscrapers, the city park right next to the river and then back to the city center for the last “sitting down” at a Viennese coffee house.

Museumsquartier ---Imperial apartments

Early on Thursday morning it was off to the train station to catch the 10 o’clock train to Prague. We walked to the West train station we arrived at from Munich since it was about 10 minutes by foot from the hotel. We purchased a sandwich and a coffee for the train ride and started looking for the platform number for our train. However there was a small problem. We couldn’t find it anywhere. It so happens that the train was supposed to leave from the South train station and not the West one. Oooops!!! Big mistake on my part. Totally “mea culpa, mea culpa mea culpa” I just assumed (this is why you should never assume) that it would leave from the same station we had arrived from Munich. Thank God we had made it to the station with plenty of time and we still had about 40 minutes before our scheduled departure time. I spoke to someone at the information counter who told me our best bet was to take a taxi because it would take us at least 30 minutes to get there with the subway. We ran downstairs, caught a taxi and 8 euros and 15 minutes later we were at the South train station: Ufff…what a relief!!! We made it there about 10 minutes before the train’s scheduled departure time and since we had a reservation we were still able to sit together. Believe me I learned my lesson: always double and triple check the name of the station your train departs from as many of the cities over here have more than one train station. With this small incident I think I lost like 5 points as a tour guide; no wonder I did not get any applauses at the end of the tour like all the other tour guides did and why my tip was substantially lower than what I expected.