Vienna

After Switzerland, I took a very long train (13 hours) To Vienna.

- Vienna is beautiful.All big clean buildings, the place seems like it could still be a giant palace to the Emperor. Crazy, I think if you took out all the shop fronts, the buildings would have been the same 100 years ago. It was pretty amazing. Although, as a guy I met there said, it's kinda like living in a museum, and all the Viennese are scarily similar. There's no real diversity. Nice place though.

Here, I was lucky enough to meet up with my cousin Bex who is currently working in London, but was on a work trip to Vienna for 2 days. So we met up and had some GIANT schnitzel with my host in Vienna, Michael.

My Fav place in Vienna was the Schunbrunn (sp?) Palace. The grounds were AMAZING, and you could totally pretend you too were royalty:

This is a SIDE garden, hence the emptiness

And the main back garden (and parks):

it takes about 20 mins just to walk from the palace to the foot of the hill I was standing on. And then there is park off both sides too. Pretty cool.

Apart from that, In Vienna I did some palaces, wandered the streets and went to the strangest thing on my trip, a vegetable orchestra. Yes. Their instruments were vegetables. It was the weirdest thing ever. The video looked ok.. :

but the concert was even weirder. In fact it was so bad I got the giggles halfway though and couldn't stop laughing for about 5mins. The fact that everyone there had paid to listen to that crap made me laugh soooo hard. Oh well, luckily it was part of a gallery opening in Vienna, so there was lots of cool interactive modern art to see too, plus it was in an old Nazi bunker of which there are a few around Vienna (6 i think, surroiunding the city) which are left over from WWII, but apparently really difficult to destroy so they are using them for aqauriums and art galleries instead.


My Vienna trip ended up watching the Ireland- France game with some couchsurfers and then we ended up playing some soccer in the middle of the night in one of the HUGE random statue/park/memorial things they have just lying around in Vienna.