Vienna, Austria 🇦🇹

Murlayna Travel: Yerp 2016

Friday, August 5

After a bit of confusion trying (and failing) to get our Viennese transit tickets at the discounted rate I wanted at the bus terminal, we ended up playing hookie and just riding the two lines to our hotel without paying.

Fortunately, this paid off as we managed to get them at the hotel checkin. The Vienna Card is a typical tourist offering that gives you full transit access along with many discounted admissions/coupons/etc that we figured we’d be using here. We only have to save 8€ with it to pay it off since we would’ve needed the transit pass anyway.

Our hotel is great, again, with another grocery store nearby (although smaller than glorious Kaufland), swanky lobby, recently renovated room (in fact, the bathroom uses literally exactly the same decorations/fixtures as in Munich), with a quiet view of a green courtyard, A/C and a great big window that opens. This one has more space though — and even a mini-fridge!

We were famished so went for a walk around the neighborhood and settled on an Italian Pizzeria. When we entered, the waitress asked us if we preferred Smoking or Not, which we coughingly answered without knowing that only a distant, glassed-off room was set aside for our kind. It was ironic and funny to feel like second-class citizens even when being treated to what ended up being our own private wing!

I had an absolutely delicious spicy chicken risotto and Laynie had a prosciutto/mushroom/pepperoncini napolipizza, the leftovers of which we had for breakfast the. next morning after our post-dinner crash.

Saturday, August 6

First things first I transferred all our perishables into the mini fridge and promptly broke a beer bottle which spilt all over the floor and under things. I called a cleaner up and she sort of mopped it up but it still smelled super boozy.

So we cracked the window and left to try and find a Hop On/Hop Off sightseeing tour bus stop. We asked at the hotel lobby and were told at which Underground stop the nearest station was, but totally forgot to ask where at the station it was… So when we arrived we were kind of dumbfounded not to find anything at all.

It’s actually pretty amazing how lucky we’ve been with just picking some direction that looks promising and following it for a while when we’re lost. In this case, we just haphazardly took a bunch of paths and 10 minutes later popped out right in front of our big yellow bus! We later found out it was the only stop for miles so how we managed to find it so perfectly is a mystery.

We bought our 24hour tickets and had 8 minutes before departure so we waded through crowds to catch a glimpse of the front entrance of the nearby Schönbrunn Palace.

Now on our bus with signature yellow headphones in place, we drove past a few stops including the castle-looking Military History Museum.

The headphones told us an upcoming stop was where Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived, which was an opportunity Laynie couldn’t miss this, so we disembarked at Belvedere Palace.

It’s gardens were beautiful and huge (although merely a tiny city apartment compared to Nymphenburg), and we strolled about here for a while. Check out the difference a panoramic vs. not makes:

Next, we took the bus to the Museum District where we planned to walk about for a while. We picked the foot of one of the huge buildings for our lunch spot, which consisted of salad and baguette with ham, Gouda, pineapple, and hot peppers, along with fruit, granola, and energy drinks — it was beyond delicious and a great little spot!

On our way out we stopped to listen to some beautiful alien smooth metal drumming sounds.

Then made a quick trip across the road to the majestic Austrian National Library with a lone van parked out front to ruin our photo.

The next stop was something that’d caught my eye the day before on the Vienna Card brochure, and I somehow coerced Laynie into joining: The Third Man Sewer Tour!! We had booked an English guided tour at 15:00 so walked to the starting manhole cover to get psyched! We got to wear neat hardhats with white hairnets; so cool, much stylish.

The tour is based off a seminal Orson Welles film noir, The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1948), which is set in (and actually shot in the rubble of) post-war Vienna and includes a climactic escape sequence through the sewers. The backdrop is virtually unchanged from those days and the entire underground tour is setup to appeal to fans of the film and the history of water hygiene alike.

There were projectors and creepy sound effects and the whole smelly atmosphere was just fascinating. Our expert (and super awesome Vienna-accented, Christoph Waltz-cadenced) guide was an excellent wealth of knowledge, too. The tour ended amidst a giant underground river that apparently those intrepid enough can boat through (although not stop since the water level can rise dangerously in 4–5 minutes).

Post-hand-sanitizer we strolled back to our sightseeing bus and rode that past too many historic buildings and sights to list (so here’s an inappropriately mundane barge crane on the banks of the Danube:)

When we arrived at the base of the Danube Tower, where we grabbed some ice cream and took in some bubble soccer at the foot of a tree in a massive public park.

After a hike through the park and neighboring United Nations complex we returned to the tower to take the glass-roofed elevator to the top for some magnificent views of the city in the setting sun.

We hopped on the final bus home and got a glimpse of the few remaining sights on the route before it closed and we had the whole bus to ourselves as it returned to the depot (which was where we wanted to go anyway).

Back at the Opera House we spent the evening gawking at all the tourists and starkly lit architecture that houses rows and rows of the same western shops in the main shopping district, which was delightful since we spent no money and simply enjoyed chatting to each other about the history of the area. And horse poop cups, which smell about as you would imagine.

We decided to walk home since it was so nice out, without realizing it was 3.25km, so it took us about an hour. We could’ve stopped at any of the alluringly illuminated cafes in the Naschtmarkt (night market) district for a bottle of wine or weinerschnitzel but we were too deep in conversation to ever pause. I cracked the lone bottle of beer I had left with me and we sipped it for the rest of the walk.

Sunday, August 7

We slept in the next day, then didn’t really know what to do since we’d hit all the stops yesterday and it was Sunday, so everything was closed — even the grocery stores. We ended up going back to Schönbrunn Palace for the day; this time we strolled around the massive gardens (which were beautiful and expansive like Nymphenburg, only more structured and people-filled). The angular hedge work and zig-zaggy layout was cool because you were always turning corners to find new paths but never really felt lost, more like you were just exploring.

There are two main buildings book-ending the main garden, the palace at the bottom and the Galleria on the top of the hill (with great views of the city), plus a very cool fountain/waterfall in the middle with mer-footed men riding mer-horses!

We struggled to the top in the heat, sat and took it in for a while, then came back down through the side-paths and trails of the left slope’s forest. At the bottom we perused the labyrinthian tall-bushes for a while before stopping to read in the shade for maybe an hour.

We’d commented to each other before about how bug-free everywhere had been in Europe (in fact all the windows are without screens), but unfortunately this was the first time the bugs were really noticeable. Dozens of bites on our legs later, we opted to start moving again and walked around the remaining side of the palace back to the entrance/U-bahn, which we skipped this time in favour of tasty gelato and a stroll home through some back streets. (Again, despite having lost all sense of where we were, Laynie at one point suggested we turn down some lane which ended up taking us directly back to our hotel door.)

We debated napping but didn’t want to risk sleeping the whole day away so we ventured out to find some grocery/liquor store open on a Sunday. Front desk told us there were a handful of such “supermarkets”, but each at distant transit hubs. We opted to make the journey anyway, expecting these to be of the Kaufland-variety and therefore worth it. They were, instead, tiny little convenience stores absolutely packed with shoppers like us, with just the bare essentials, at nowhere near cheap prices. We bought two beers, a 6€ mickey of Rum, and some snacks; this would be dinner.

Back at our hotel room we quickly learned why the rum was so cheap, it tasted like smokey gasoline and was barely drinkable even when mixed with Coke. We only finished half of it before switching to beer. Luckily our plan still worked and we were drunk in no time, so we changed into fancy clothes and set out for a magic-hour galavant around central Vienna.

First thing on our minds was to return to a food stand that we’d passed the previous day but opted to skip; it served giant hot dogs/bratwurst in baguette buns and smelt incredibly delicious.

It was easily the best thing we’ve eaten yet and we inhaled it along with two more beers on the comfy chairs of a nearby cafe. (We originally thought the cafe was closed but when the waiter came out and asked us what we wanted, he instantly understood what was going on and let us stay undisturbed. We left a tip on the table to say thanks.) Next on the agenda was shenanigans, obviously:

Many narrow lanes and statues and monuments and pee breaks later we cut through one lane that was warmly lit, with a row of tables sparsely filled with couples sipping wine and laughing. As soon as we turned out of it we both knew we had to go back, so we looped the block (to save face) and sat down, even though it was definitely above our usual spending range. It was worth it though — for the second time in one night, it was the new best thing we’d done so far: the atmosphere was so perfectly romantic and European, the rosé was delicious, and the company enthralling.

Monday, August 8

Our morning was comparatively uneventful: we checked out early, grabbed supplies from the grocery store, then took the Underground until switching to a real train bound for the airport. Alas, somehow we were running super late by the time we reached it, so our saving grace was that the (labyrinthian) Vienna airport turned out to be uber efficient; we were through security and such with no more than 3 minutes wait-time at any of the stops.

We got on the special bus that took us out to the runway and boarded our tiny propellor plane bound for Dubrovnik, Croatia via Belgrade, Serbia.