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.

Vienna: Day One

All day long I’ve had The Fray’s “Vienna” running through my head, and guess what?? For the first time ever, I’m actually in Vienna while it’s been running through my head. I already love this city. It’s beautiful. The buildings and architecture, the streets, I have such a hard time putting how I feel about all these incredible cities into words. Let’s just say I could wander these streets with just my eyes and my camera for hours.

We were all pretty exhausted today after our exciting train ride, so we decided to take it easy.

  After we dropped off our stuff at the hotel, we took the U-Bahn into town, just walked around Stephanplatz for awhile, 

and then got on a tram that goes around the main part of the city. We rode it all around the circle just to see what there was to see, and then rode it around again but this time got off at certain places.  I love the architecture in Vienna.  The buildings are beautiful.

The big statue/monument-type-thing of Mozart made me really wish Dad was with me. 

After some time in the city, we went back to the hotel to try and solidify what it is we wanted to do. Of course I fell asleep and my friends got distracted by the Olympics for awhile before we headed back out.

For dinner we stopped at a Wurste (pronounced “vurst”) Stand (Wurste are giant sausage-hotdogs). Deeeelicious. Especially because I got a KaiseKreiner (spelling is probably waay off), which has cheese oozing out of the sausage as well.

We threw around a Frisbee for awhile in some grass, and then stopped by the Hofburg Palace (where the Hapsburg Royal Family used to live and now is used for some political thing), where they have free classical music concerts, which are projected outside on a giant screen. It was pretty cool.  

We spent some more time walking around, looking at stuff, and taking pictures.

(Courtesy of Lauren)

This is the main political building now... but I don't know much about Vienna's government or what this building is called!

So, today we basically just messed around. But we messed around in Vienna, which makes all the difference.

Night Train

So, even though this probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone, we did not sleep very well on our train to Vienna. It’s just hard to sleep sitting up (well, hard for most people. Obviously not for Danielle because she slept sitting up with her mouth open for a big chunk of the time). About halfway through the night, we realized that we could pull out the chairs far enough that if it was okay for the person directly across from us (David in my case) we could work out a deal to stretch out next to the feet/legs of the person across. I don’t know if that made sense, but it definitely made for some better sleeping. Also, Alex (the German guy) got off the train at 4 am which made for a lot more room for the rest of us, since we’re all pretty comfortable with each other. Sooo… I guess the point of this story is sleeping on trains not in sleeping cars is not the funnest thing… but that’s okay because just being in Europe is lots of fun.

Berlin: Day Two

After a wonderful full night of sleep, we got dressed up, jumped on a bus, and attended church in German. Of course the only German lady that I talked to before church actually started has a daughter living in Gilbert. Go figure. PS I really like to sing in other languages. So fun.

We rushed home from church to pack up and check out of our hotel (thank goodness we got to store our luggage at the hotel so we didn’t have to lug it around all day).

First sight-seeing destination of the day = Brandenburg Gate. Really I don’t know the historical significance, but it was a cool building. 

We ate our lunches of bread and peanut butter (and I might have just spread my peanut butter with my finger…), first under the Brandenburg Gate, but people were looking at us funny.  

So, we moved to the park, which is just so beautiful. 

The rest of the afternoon was spent walking around, and taking the Autobahn and seeing the city.

This is some kind of Holocaust Monument

Look how cool the clouds are!!!  Also, "DB" is the company that does the trains in Germany (at least I think)

A scene of The Bourne Ultimatum takes place at this very spot.  Bourne  tells the Julia Stiles character to get on a tram, just like this: 

Of course we had to get Stephen to take a picture with the "robot"

I don't even know how many times we yelled "Get out of the bike lane!" to Danielle or Lauren.  In Berlin (and in Vienna too), there are SO many bike riders, and they have designated lanes for them on the sidewalks.  There were quite a few close calls.  haha.

What I think about Berlin:

I’m glad that I got the chance to see Berlin, but it would never be one of my favorite cities. Ehhh, I don’t know.

We are currently on a train to Vienna. A night-train, but not in beds. It’s us five in a cabin (that kind of reminds all of us of Harry Potter) with a 27-year-old German guy who works at Gamestop and speaks English.