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On Tuesday morning we left Prague at 8:30AM for Vienna. Having spoken to several people about our travels & having heard on a number of occasions that Vienna was lovely & well worth a visit, we decided to leave Prague a day early & go to Budapest a day later so that we could fit in a couple of nights in Vienna in between. Being a pretty big Sound of Music fan from an early age I've always wanted to go to Austria (& yes, I know that's Salzburg, but you know, close enough!) & given that it's right in between Prague & Budapest, we figured why not? :) Because it's a train that doesn't require any seat reservations we had the luxury of having our own little cabin all to ourselves. So we had six seats to stretch out on between us, which trust me, is a very exciting deal when you're training your way around Europe! So we spent a good couple of hours or so napping it up along the way…
When we arrived in Vienna we navigated our way to yet another Wombats hostel. They'd been so good in Berlin & Munich, & are the top rated hostels in each of the cities they exist in so we figured it'd be a safe bet staying there again. Plus if you stay in 2 different wombats hostels you get a free brekky, & if you stay in 3 of them you get a special surprise!! Which turns out to be……a free towel!!! Haha Yeah, I reckon that's probably the reason they advertise it as a "surprise" :P Still it's pretty cute…has a wombat on it. And being poor travelers we weren't about to turn down free goods so we crammed an extra 2 towels into our bags! Because we'd made the booking last minute the only rooms available were dorm rooms, but we were sharing with a lovely French Canadian couple who were very normal & not remotely creepy. AND they didn't snore!! :D
Once we'd unpacked & settled in we set off into town to have a wander around & get acquainted with the city. We first wandered through the Maschmarkt, which was right next to our hostel, then we walked into the main centre of town to a café that one of Nigel's friends, Brett, had recommended, called Hotel Sacher. There's a very famous type of Viennese cake called the Sacher cake, which has been the subject of many disputes over who actually has the original recipe & whose is the best. Hotel Sacher has THE original Sacher cake & only a small handful of people there have ever seen the recipe - very top secret! It's a layered chocolate cake with a rich chocolate icing & some jammy kinda stuff in it as well. It comes with an official Sacher chocolate button on top & is served with unsweetened whipped cream. Om nom nom! Hate to break it to the Viennese but I still prefer my Mum's choc macadamia nut cake… :)
After cake we went for a bit of a wander around the main parts of town, & I must say, with just a slight tinge of regret, that I didn't love it quite as much as I was hoping to. The funny thing about places, I've found, is that you pretty much either instantly fall in love with them, or you don't i.e., I adored Paris (some people despise it), but Barcelona was never really for me (& I have heard people rave about it). I mean, it's a lovely city, & I'm glad we went there, but I think perhaps because I had a very romanticized idea of Sound of Music-esque hillsides & Fraulein Maria singing "The hills are alive…" that it wasn't quite what I expected! Perhaps I'll try Salzburg next time instead :P But hey, you never know unless you go there & check it out for yourself!
In the evening we went to a restaurant just down the road from our hostel, which the hostel staff had recommended in their guide to Vienna. Hmm…it was another one of those hit & miss kinda experiences. It was a medieval themed restaurant & it appealed because of the lure of "big plates of vegetables", & I was beginning to feel like I might come down with scurvy if I didn't get some proper veges into me soon (people of Europe, lettuce with 2 slivers of tomato & ridiculous amounts of dressing does NOT = salad!!). Oh medieval it was…right down to the annoying, harp plucking music that played the WHOLE time we were there haha Nigel looked like he was about to snap :P BUT we did get a big plate of cooked veges, as promised, along with some yummy goulash & weird potato donut things…Oh & some salad as well, although I'm pleased to report that given we are both still alive we clearly managed to dodge the ecoli! ;)
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