Vienna the home of Mozart, wiener schnitzel and apple strudel is the next point of call on our tour of Europe via the rail. After a wonderful train ride from Prague to Vienna we arrived to quite a substantial snow fall. Made our little dance in the street after snow in Prague seem a little pityful, so we followed it up with a dance outside the train station in Vienna!
We are definitely starting to see the real cold winter temperatures everyone warned us about. While its snowing you don’t seem to notice the cold, but when the snow stops falling the novelty wears off and all of a sudden its just cold and you have wet patches creeping up your jeans from walking in the snow!
After defrosting in Our hostel we went off to see the world famous Vienna Christmas markets. Everything I have read says they are the best in the world! And they certainly impressed, if not the markets, the view of the buildings around the markets all lit up, in the snow definitely impressed! One of the buildings was lit up as an advent calendar and looked absolutely fabulous! The song I have been teaching the children from work really hit home at these markets and I had to stop myself from bursting into a rendition of “its beginning to look a lot like Christmas”. After sampling a few of the local hot punch drinks and a bit of local food, sausages and apple kebabs and some very strange cake that was like a massive profiterole log with mock cream, we had had enough of the massive crowd and decided to head back to the hostel for a quiet night so we could spend the day doing the tourist thing the next day before getting the train to Salzburg. A quiet night didn’t really eventuate after the American couple in our door invited us for a drink, which turned into many beers in the hostel pub, followed by a HUGE weiner schnitzel at 11pm and then more drinks at the restaurant where we got the schnitzel (I had to do it just to tell Dad I had Weiner schnitzel in Austria!). Then we were convinced by the restaurant owner to try her homemade local peach schnapps or firewater as we called it. We then got an amazing performance from a trio of old guys on the accordion, violin and Double Bass. They were incredible, playing so many classical pieces! Never would have guessed it was a dirt little late night café open till 6 am!
By the time we got up the next morning and checked the train timetables on the net we discovered that salzberg was not going to work with the train connections, so we had to give it a miss and decided to stay in Vienna for the day and then get the 9.30 overnight train to Bern, Switzerland. A whole day to sight see in Vienna. Only problem was no one had warned us that NOTHING and I mean NOTHING is open in Vienna on a Sunday, so after a very cold walk around the city we ended up spending the day in and irish pub watching English football and waiting until we could get our train! Bit of a disappointment.
Stay tuned for the story of our first overnight train and Bern!
