Vienna: Day Two (and Night Train #2)

At the exact moment that I am typing this, I am on a train to Venice. I got a “couchette” this time, which is a little bed in a cabin with 5 other beds (a very small cabin). I can’t sit up straight, but I’m so excited to be able to lay down tonight. The funniest part of this situation is that I am unable to communicate with anyone else in my cabin. There is a older-middle-age couple from Romania (Romany???), and three Asian girls. I can’t quite figure it out, but it seems that the Asian girls are with the Romanian couple. Haha. The Romanians keep trying to talk to me, but I can’t understand. It’s funny because they keep trying to tell me things like that I might want to turn around the other way to sleep because if my head is by the air conditioning I might get cold. I tried to explain that I’m just laying this way on my duffle bag right now, but I will sleep the other way. I don’t really know if they understood. What an adventure.

So, about Vienna today. Some of us were planning on going to the Music Museum today, but we had some setbacks: #1: David’s clock was still set on London time and he didn’t even realize it until later that day (he thought we were just being impatient and wanting to leave early when we kept knocking on his door when really it was because he was late). #2: We decided to stop across the street for pastries for breakfast. Sooooo good (and gigantic). 

#3: We missed our stop… and went four stops too far because we were so busy talking, so we had to do some backtracking. So… we got to the museum and decided that paying 8.50 euros wasn’t worth a half an hour, so we kinda walked around and looked in stores for a little bit. 

 We met up with the rest of the group at this one museum that Professor Benfell suggested we go to. We mostly spent time looking at the art, but we also checked out some pretty cool Egyptian stuff. Then, my favorite part of the day was our trip out to Schonbrunn.

Schonbrunn is kind of the Versailles of Vienna. It was the summer home of the royal Hapsburg family, who was in power for SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY years!!!! (until around 1918 or so). It’s crazy to me that one family was in power that long. We paid a little extra for the guided tour, which was well worth it because we got to hear all the stories about Maria Theresa, her sixteen children (who were married for political alliances--one of which is Marie Antoinette with France), and some of her descendants that lived there. Everything was so ornate, gaudy, spacious. There was a painting of one of the times that the royal family decided to let everyone come watch them eat this six hour dinner. I don’t really understand how they felt that was welcoming??

After Schonbrunn, it was goodbye to my friends. I was kind of sad saying goodbye, because I’ve lived with them for the past two months. It will be so weird not to see them every waking hour, and only run into them once in awhile. I made some really good friends here that I hope I don’t lose contact with.

I saw some missionaries and asked them if they knew Elder Ball (Mason). One of them was actually his companion recently! He wrote down my name and is going to write Mason a note and tell him that I said hi. It made me really excited, and it’s so cool that he’s been serving in this amazing city.

And yes, I am still on the train. The Romanian man and one of his friends just came in and asked if I had internet so I could look up the Beijing Olympics to see Romania and Hungary (and not even in English). Hahaha.

I’m going to be waking up in Venice. How cool is that.