Public transportation woes, an opera, and Sachertorte!

Yay for free days and sleeping in and a much needed ten hours sleep.  I accidentally missed breakfast today, so I grabbed a pretzel roll at the ghetto grocery store next door instead.

I was tempted to just stay in the hotel today, not only because I was exhausted, but because I really didn't know what there was to do in Vienna, but I couldn't stay.  Not when I was in a foreign city in Austria.

I went out exploring with a smaller group around 11.  I didn't have a particular destination in mind and was kind of just following them, which made it much less frustrating when it took us at least an hour to figure out how the public transportation worked.  The directions from the hotel concierge turned out to be completely horrible, so we wandered around our sketchy part of Vienna in search of a tram car that wasn't to be found.  After asking a few strangers from directions and putting to use Hannah's wonderful German translation skills, we'd found another way into the city through the subway instead.

Finally the subway!!!

We got off the subway at Stephensplatz and came up right by St. Stephen's Cathedral.  The Cathedral was in a nice little square, which seemed to be a pretty central location. We've seen a fair amount of churches so far on this trip, but St. Stephen's seemed to be different because when we were there they had a choir singing.  I'm not sure if that was just by chance or if they always have that, but it was really cool and definitely made it seem more like a church than a tourist attraction.

We grabbed lunch in a little hole-in-the-wall type place, which ended up to be DELICIOUS.  I had something called Brenner, which was basically hotdogs wrapped in bacon.  Yum.  We also stopped at the Sacher Hotel to try the famous Sachertorte (chocolate cake).  The Austrian food has been phenomenal so far.

Brenner

Sachertorte

We were able to figure our way back to the hotel a bit easier, thankfully.  We took the tram we'd been looking for in the morning.

I was able to get a quick run in too--on the treadmill rather than outside because I'm not a fan of running alone in sketchy Vienna.  Usually I don't like treadmills, but this was actually a pretty good run.  Finished just in time to grab dinner at the hotel (dessert was an imitation of the Sachertorte we had earlier!!) before heading to the Vienna Opera House to see "The Barber of Seville".

I'd never seen an opera before, so I wasn't sure what to expect, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it.  I thought their voices were pretty good, but the repetition in the songs got to be a bit tedious for me.  I spent a lot of the show switching the translations back and forth between English and German.  I was pretty happy that I could follow a lot of the German translation.


It's crazy to realize how lucky we were to have tickets not only to the opera, but to the Philharmonic.  These are world class shows we're seeing, and it's easy to take it for granted or not realize it.  Tomorrow we get to go visit a newspaper, and I'm pretty excited for that.



Until next time.