About Vienna

KAtie and i already love vienna! there are hardly any tourists here! we went to the Shanbrun Palace yesterday. Spelling is way off...but i do not have the map, so i do not know how to spell it correctly. The palace was beautiful! A little more recent than what we have been seeing in Italy, so the decoration was not as cluttered. I posted some pictures of the outside gardens, because there was no photographz alowed from inside the palace. i will just saz this, it is almost every girls dream to have attend a ball in the grand ball room of this palace!

I think the reason the German consists of words made of 7 or 8 letters, two of which are vowels, and two of which are z´s, is because their keyboards are all arranged very awkwardly. as you can see my z´s and y´s are mixed up a lot...

We explored a lot of Vienna last night which kept us out till 11ish. this is pretty late for us, since we have been getting up at 7am. we are usuallz exhausted by dinner time.

After exploring the palace grounds thoroughly, we headed to historic downtown vienna. We have been using the metro faithfullz, saving our feet and back as much as we can. we came up out of the underground metro, the "U", right in front of St. Stephen´s Cathedral. We decided to get something to eat before going into the church, otherwise we would have been too distracted bz our hunger to appreciate the interior. we bought lunch a fast food place called Anker. I wish we had these in the US. they have manz kinds of bread, and sandwiches and pastries. I had the best sandwich of my life! i think it was fresh Mozzerella, tomatoes, some seasoning, and some square bread..i am really not sure what its called...but it is good! Frisheta, maybe? anyway, it was good. i could hold back mz chocolate craving no longer, so i topped it off with a chocolate muffin. katie had a salami sandwich and a date pastry.

We were not prepared for what awaited us inside St. Stephen´s Cathedral. It was a total change from what we had seen in Italy. The architecture was so gothic, and intricate, in a totally different way. There were more sculptures and fewer paintings. there are pictures posted.

We also went into St. Peter´s Basilica down the street. we were fortunate to come 15 mins before an organ recital. We took pictures of the beautiful architecture and paintings, then enjoyed the sound of the organ music for 15 or 20 mins. I have also posted a picture of this basilica.

Having been gone from laundry facilities for 12 days had begun to show...or smell i should say! :) it was not that bad, because we have been washing what we could in the sink as we needed. we were so glad to find the hostel we are staying in has laundry machines. We came back to the hostel to wash all our dirty clothes. this took quite a while. afterwords we came out and found the internet place we posted from last. we were so excited to find such a good price for internet, we decided to come back today! only, we could not find it again! we must have gotten of teh wrong stop last night, and found that one bz mistake, or something. we searched and searched for it again to night, but without sucess. we found another for the same price though, so we gave up the search. katie is working on our next few days of our itinerary and left the blogging up to me.

Today we visited the Lipazzaner Riding School! IT was so much fun! I wish I could have traded places with you Bekah, just for today! Then i could have been with jade, and you could have seen the stallions! o well. we stayed for about an hour and a half, watching the riders warm up and exercise about 15 white Lipazzaner Stalions. They were gorgeous! We even were fortunate enough to see one jump a few times, they say it is a rare sight. Enjoy the pictures Bekah! they are the only ones i could take, because photographs were not allowed durring the "morning exercise to music."

We found a STARBUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE STARBUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :) ok...we had our American fix for the trip. :)

Today we visited the homes of Mozart, Shubert and Strouss. The Mozart home was the most informative. It came with an audio guide, and lasted about an hour i think. we walked through three floors of his apartment building, one of which was where he lived durring his composition of "marriage of Figaro." (and many other great masterpieces) I could not take pictures there...:(

Dinner tonight was at a local pub. Katie had something beef with potatoes...it was GOOD! and i had roast turkey on a green salad. I was feeling a need for veggitables, since we have had a lot of fruit. I had a fruit topped, cream filled pastry for desert from the next door bakery...yum!

That brings us to now. Sorry for the typos and bad punctuation (Dr. Johnson please forgive me!). We are paying for every minute, and i cant aford to go back and check everything AND do pictures...so enjoy!

Auf Wiedersehen! (goodbye!)