vienna

alright so no uploading pictures because it turns out that the internet connection in my hotel in iceland is SUPER slow... but luckily i uploaded to picasa before i left stockholm this morning so there are little slideshow thingys at the bottom...

anyhow, i met carol, alexis and mia late friday night in vienna... our hotel was ok a bit outside of the city center but vienna is expensive so that was fine with all of us :)  we were pretty good about getting up in the morning most days i think that we left our hotel at 9 at the latest quite a few days we left earlier :)  our first stop was the hofburg to try and buy tickets for the lippanzaner horses, my dad lived in austria for a bit when he was growing up and gave me a list of must see things - the lippanzaner horses and the boys choir were obviously on that list.  well the horses were the start of a series of complete fails on this trip - don't get me wrong we had a REALLY great time but a number of things that we specifically had been interested in seeing ended up being cancelled etc.

so we got to the hofburg the line for horse tickets was super long we get to the front and we are told that the horses are sick and will not be doing a performance but we can see them practice... so we went in and saw the practice which mostly involved horses walking around in a circle and not really doing too much interesting - but it was still packed as a result of the cancelled performance.  the rest of the day we took a tour of the state opera house, walked through a crypt or two, and went to stephansdom... plus demels and a few other cute vienna stores, we also walked through a bunch of easter markets... the easter markets were amazing - so many beautiful painted blown eggs... we all wanted to buy them to bring home, but only alexis was brave enough, i knew with all my upcoming travels that they would be broken in no time... we ended the day with some great austrian wine and then ate dinner out in the square outside of the synagogue, during dinner we watched the kids play what seemed to be some austrian version of red rover - it was quite cute!

the second day we got up early again to go see the boys choir... however after waiting in line a bit again at the hofburg we were told that this was one of 2 sundays during their season (from sept to june) that they do not perform - UGH again!  neither of our guide books mentioned this of course... anyhow, we hung out and waited for the hofburg to open and toured the imperial apartments, the silver collection, the treasury and the sissi museum... the austrians seem to looooooooooove sissi and franz joseph... we heard A LOT about them, including the fact that she was 5'10" 90lbs and ate only raw meat juice - GROSS... then we got giant sausages on the street and went to hotel sacher for sacher torte... another one of the things on my dad's list... the torte was definitely good but not quite what i was expecting... i was thinking it would be some SUPER chocolately thing, but it was more apricot-y... still very good and a fun experience...in the afternoon we went out to the summer palace and heard even more about sissi and franzy... they were pretty much our best friends at that point... afterwards we came back into the city and had some wine at another restaurant near the jewish museum, probably our favorite place of the whole trip, it was tiny and adorable and had great austrian wine

we finished off our last night in vienna with dinner at a diner - we tried a million other places but people there don't seem to eat terribly late and places were already sold out of food!

we got up early monday morning and headed to the train station for budapest...