Vienna
Trip dates: February 23, 2017 - February 25, 2017
On our way from Budapest to Vienna, we got to ride in a normal OBB (Austrian railway) train. We had an OBB train previously for Rome to Vienna (before going to Prague), but since that one was a sleeper train, it was slightly different.
We noticed that people in Austrian trains all sat in their reserved seats - even if they were right next to strangers with many open seats. Kind of weird because elsewhere in European metros, people often leave gaps in seats and don't sit next to each other. Oh well, silly rule-following Austrians. We ended up shifting around to have space for ourselves, since the train was pretty empty.
One of the coolest things about OBB trains in 1st class is that they have little electronic indicators above the seats to show if they are reserved or not. This was the first time we'd seen that! It made it a lot easier to tell if we were safe to sit somewhere when we didn't have the seat reserved. The alternative is you pick a seat and get kicked out later and then have to scramble to find another seat (or two in our case).
When we arrived in Vienna, we stayed at a hotel near the train station for convenience and since it was cheaper & supposedly was near food options. Turns out the food wasn't quite so great, especially since I was feeling more sick and less inclined to wander around, but more on that below.
When we first got in, we just took a little walk around the hotel to see the area (OK, and hunt some new Pokemon as the Gen2 update had just come out while we were in Rome). We were next to the Museum of Military History which had some cool buildings, so we got some fresh air there.
The next day, I was still feeling a bit feverish but I took some ibuprofen and we headed out to do a couple hours of sightseeing, since we were supposed to leave Vienna the following day. Our hotel had a tram right outside of it that went to the main part of Vienna, so we hopped on it and off we went! Ok just kidding, I needed to get euro coins to pay the fare, but then we hopped on it.
We got off the tram near Maria-Theresien-Platz, walked through Neue Burg and Hofburg Palace, saw St. Stephen's Cathedral, looped to Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, then to Rathausplatz, before taking the tram to Belvedere Palace and walking back to our hotel.
We encountered some pushy vendors trying to sell concert tickets by Maria-Theresien-Platz. One of them was trying all Asian languages on us to see if we'd respond - I kindly just glared at the guy and said 'American' and then ignored him, but otherwise it was pretty quiet from a vendor perspective. There were a fair number of tourists around which seemed kind of surprising.
There was also a whole ice skating complex set up at Rathausplatz with multiple skating rinks that were connected through a series of very wet (it wasn't that cold) ice/water pathways. Lots of kids roaming around and vendors selling drinks and snacks. It felt quite festive and winter-y, even though it was already late February.
Otherwise, general impressions of Vienna was that it's very clean and has a lot of history seeping out of it. The architecture was all quite cool and a nice mix of historic with updated and cleaned up buildings. I've been to Austria once when I was in high school but barely remember it; this seemed to be reminiscient of those times!
Since we stayed by the train station, there was a bunch of international food and most of it was just OK. It seems Austrian food is really a mix of German and Italian along with some Hungarian - we saw goulash on a bunch of menus. We did eat at one more traditional Bräu (brewery) in addition to some Asian food (comfort food craving while sick).
We ended up eating at the same little Italian place next to our hotel back to back for dinner and lunch before we left since nothing else was really open that had fast service. Oh well, at least their pizza was pretty good and decently priced and the people who worked there were nice, so we just rolled with it.
Sad story - when Lishan or I aren't feeling well, Asian food (especially Chinese) is generally our fall back comfort food. We ended up eating at a Japanese fusion place because of this. However, on the way there, we passed a Szechuan restaurant that had really great ratings. We planned to eat there later at dinner, but then we noticed that they were closed for renovations! Crushed, we decided to try ordering delivery Chinese. We called a place and spoke to them in Mandarin, but they wouldn't deliver to our hotel because it was too far away. I was really excited about the food we were going to order too! :(
Enough sobbing, here's the food pics:
Unfortunately, by the end of our time in Vienna, I was still not over my fever or general malaise. I had a fever for both days we were there with some stuffy nose/coughing and general felt pretty crummy. Not to mention I was keeping Lishan up in the night! Hopefully things would take a turn for the better in Slovenia...
