Vienna, not Virginia :(

So Zurich has looked like this for the past FOUR weeks!!

We really wanted to go somewhere warm and relax and do a little sightseeing for my 4 day weekend (love the Catholic holidays here...Ascension Thursday!!!) Well we looked everywhere within a 3 hour flight and everywhere was going to rain. So, we decided on Vienna, Austria.

Starting the trip off in style! Even though it was only an hour flight we took advantage of cheap business class!  It was only $15 extra.

And had a great breakfast.

We landed in Vienna by 9am Thursday morning and took the public transport to our hotel. The public transportation was much like Zurich's. They had trains and trams that ran on the street. We stayed at the Intercontinental which was right downtown. We found a steal of a deal on Hotwire paying a 3 star price for a 5 star hotel, which made it even better!  I highly recommend going to Hotwire and using the "mystery hotels" and then looking at http://www.betterbidding.com/. This website can usually uncover the "mystery" part of it by the location, star level, amenities, and previous users to just tell you which hotel it will be.  Great deals!

After a little nap at the hotel we headed downtown to explore. First stop, St. Stephen's Cathedral.

We were planning on doing the sightseeing bus on Friday, but we walked right into a Vienna Sightseeing Tours bus (which is a hop on hop off bus) as it was about to begin a new tour, so we decided why not do it now and figure out the lay of the land. We bought the 24 hour pass so we could spread out the 3 different hour tours. Well once we hopped on, we didn't hop off. We did the first tour of the central downtown area then got off and walked around a little bit but it was chilly out so we decided to do a second tour out to Shoenbrunn Palace. We forgot to take a picture though.

We were hungry for lunch after the tour so what a better place than McDonalds right?

And then the rain came. And it came hard! So what else to do than find a pub. We just walked into a random place that had a lot of people inside. So Vienna has not put the no smoking law into place. Boy did we smell of smoke when we walked out of there!

Day 2

We got a little bit of a late start on the town because our hotel had a awesome gym. It was in the hotel but outside people had memberships. Since we don't belong to a gym in Zurich, we were excited to exercise in a gym with real machine instead of over our coffee table in the family room. Then we did the last loop of the bus tour to the Belvedere Castle since our 24 hours were almost up.

Then onto what I came to Vienna for.... The Sachertorte. The Sacher hotel is a famous for their chocolate cake called the Sacher Torte. It is only made in Vienna and Salzburg and can only be bought in Austria.

Yummm

I love the European lifestyle of stopping at least once or twice at a coffee house in the middle of the day!

We saw a bunch of bike racks that said free bike tours so we decided to check it out. Highly recommended! I think a lot of cities have these now. You use a credit card to make a deposit then your first hour of riding is free, then 1 euro an hour after that. How much better can you get? There were a lot of stands all over downtown and you can return the bikes to any stand!

The main driving street in Vienna. The street are beautiful and all lined with big trees!

Then onto the wine district!

That is one big mug of wine!

mmmmmm a great dinner of homemade cheeses!

Biggest sausage I have ever seen.

The weather was not so nice.  It was very windy so we took the public transport to the Belvedere Castle which is a Baroque castle built by Prince Eugene(who ever that is). It has beautiful gardens but we didn't stay out long to enjoy them since it was so cold. We did take the tour of the main house. I was a little disappointed because I thought it was going to be a home tour with the old furniture which I love, but it was more like an art gallery. I think I remember Zann saying "this is lame".

So we took a little stroll around the town instead of more castle touring before stopping for another coffee and chocolate truffle cake!

We enjoyed a nice glass of wine at the hotel then headed our for our last dinner. The hotel concierge recommended Purstner because it had traditional Austrian food with big portions that were reasonable.

Well boy was he right. I think we ate 1/4 of our food. Zann got his favorite wienerschnitzel and I got kaesespaetzle. Kaesespatzle is like my favorite alper macaroni but with spaetzle instead of noodles.

Well looking back on this trip it seems that I wrote mostly about what we ate.  Its true, that's pretty much what this trip was. By the way, our last meal was at TGI Fridays for our American food fix of Nachos.  So hope you enjoyed our food blog :) The weather was not cooperating, so we didn't walk long between stops inside. But overall a great trip!