Vienna, Austria!

We left for Vienna, on a night train sometime around 6pm to Zurich. After an hour layover we then got on the night train and had those horrible sleeper seats. We got to Vienna around 8:30 AM and headed to our hostel, which was only about a 5 minute walk. It was pretty cold when we got there, and it was raining and snowing. Yet again we couldn’t check in until around noon. So we put our backpacks in the lockers and were ready to head out. We decided that our first stop would be food though, Kebabs for breakfast? Yep. So after we finished up we headed to the Summer Palace. This was a HUGE house home to, what we were told was Marie Antoinette, in the summer time. It had so many rooms, but it was more that 8€ to even walk in. so we decided instead to walk around the outside and see the grounds. It was pretty cold and dreary, but it looked like it would be a wonderful place when the ground was green and flowers had bloomed. We took a long walk up a huge hill and when we were at the top we got an amazing view of Vienna. By then it had stopped raining and we could get some great pictures. At the top of this hill there was even a very fancy restaurant. After we were finished at the Summer Palace, we went back to the hostel to take a quick nap, or so we thought… next thing we knew it was dark outside, and Meeks was coming out of the shower. We then realized it was almost 6 PM! Greg yelled “everyone get up! We have limited amount of sunlight! We need to see things still!” So we started to get up pretty quickly and got dressed. We decided the best thing to do would be to go to the opera. We took a metro and ended up right in front of it. We saw men in pressed suits, and women in cocktail dresses and fur coats. We wanted to go in but we felt pretty out of place. We went in just to see for fun how much it would be to get a ticket. Turns out it was only 3€ to stand at the top. So we each had a one-person section to stand in, with a little electronic monitor in front of us that we set to English, so that the opera could be translated for us. The room was huge with a beautiful chandelier, and we had a great view of all the people in the fancy outfits. As much as I was skeptical about seeing an opera, it was amazing. Even without the translation, you could understand what was happening, because of the music and emotions. After about an hour we were pretty hungry, and tired of fighting for a place to stand and see, so we left at intermission. We walked through the streets and saw another huge gothic church called Stephensdom pretty similar to the Glockenspiel. After picking up a couple souvenirs, we headed home. We stopped into a little food place. We all got wiener schnitzels with French fries and it was DELCIOUS, and cheap. After that we went home for some showering and freshening up. It was pretty late and all of the girls weren’t ready until around 11pm. We didn’t really know where to go so we went to Wombat’s the hostel where the other group of girls were staying. They weren’t there so instead we took a couple jager bombs. We asked the guy at the front where to go out, and he gave us some directions but we didn’t really follow them. We walked until we found a bar, but there were two people coming out talking in English. They told us that they were from Texas and that the bar we were about to go to was way over priced and really boring. So they had heard of another bar and we just followed them. We walked in and it was pretty crowded. We sat down at an empty table and happened to sit in a huge group of Americans! They had only been studying there about a week, but we got drinks and sat talking to them for couple hours, meeting their friends. Before we knew it was after 3 AM! So we finished up our last drinks and headed home. But before we reached our hostel, we got more kebabs. We woke up the next morning pretty early; we had a train at 9:30. We got on that train without reservations, so the boys found an empty luggage room to sit in for the 6 hours. Luckily all of the girls found seats. We ate nothing; we were starving within the first hour. And then about 4 hours in the train conductor came over the intercom speaking in German, and everyone was laughing. After a couple more languages he came on in English saying, “the engine is not good, we stay here a little”… greattttttt. So after almost an 10 hour train ride, were finally in Zurich. We looked up at the train times, and realized we had 10 minutes or 2 hours. We were so hungry, but we didn’t want to miss the train. The boys sprinted to the kebab stand, while the girls grabbed the first thing we saw (some odd square pizza). The train was right behind the food so we sprinted on to the first second-class car we saw. Looking around we didn’t know if the boys would make it, but right before they blew the whistle the guys jumped on, with kebabs in hand. And in about 2 hours we were back in the Montarina!