Adventures in Austria! 

Disclaimer: There is so much I want to say about this trip. I know that I won't be able to say it all but I'm going to write about as much as I can. This is going to be really long just a heads up sorry! I don't know where to start except with how this trip was even possible.

This trip started with the invite by my friend and roommate Cassandra Dean! She was going to Vienna for the whole summer because her uncle who lives in Vienna invites one of his nieces or nephews to come stay with them each year. Her mom went with her for the first three weeks but had to get back to her job and didn't want Cassandra to fly back by herself so they asked me if I wanted to go. I had always wanted to go somewhere adventurous and this was a once-I-in-a-lifetime chance, but still I had a hard time deciding on what I wanted to do. In the end I decided it would be a great opportunity and couldn't let it pass me by and I'm very happy I didn't!

The weeks leading up to the trip everyone I told about it asked me if I was excited and to take a lot of pictures. I was more nervous then anything else but I pep talked myself into being excited. Being by myself on the flights is what scared me the most. The first flight was really good about 4 hours to New Jersey. I slept for a lot of it. I had a three hour lay-over so I got lunch and called my mom then went to find my gate. Which was a lot harder than I thought it would be. It is a huge airport! In the end I asked someone and learned I had to take a bus to another building entirely! Then I got off at the wrong building but I asked the person at the desk and she helped me out. I finally got on the plane after they boarded everyone else. The girl I sat next to was super sweet though and from Budapest so I felt a lot better being able to talk to someone from Europe. We had a good flight. About 8 hours. Finding my way out of the airport was really tricky for me! Took me two accidentally extra stamps in my passport for me to ask someone where the exit was! My goodness! Figuring out the public transport was something I learned how to do very well here in Vienna! A lady helped me figure out what train then subway then bus I needed to take to reach Cassandra! I was so grateful for her.

I was so tired after all of that but it was noon in Vienna so I wasn't allowed to sleep for more than an hour in worry that I wouldn't be able to sleep at night! Ha! After my nap, Cassandra and I took a hike to the vineyards behind where we were staying. It was super cool! Here is one of my first looks of Vienna.

Here is a picture of the cute cobblestone road we walked on to get there.

I was even more worn out when we got back but it was only 4 and I wasn't allowed to sleep till 8:30! Jet lag is the absolute worst! So Cassandra and I went out to find something to eat. We found the Gorilla Kitchen and had a pork burrito, I know--very authentic! After that, we wandered the streets! It was actually one of my favorite things we did because the buildings were all so tall and old looking. Really I don't explain it well but it was so cute! When my head hit the pillow that night I was out in an instant and slept for the following 14 hours. I probably could've slept even more if Cassandra wouldn't have told me to wake up and get ready for the adventures we were going to have!

I'm now just going to tell you about the things I saw during my two weeks there--along with pictures of course!

There are lots and lots of old Catholic Church/Cathedrals in Vienna so I can't even tell you how many I went into while I was here. Many of them are really big and beautiful. Lots of pictures and statues of Christ on a cross. I think that it is wonderful that people are looking for God in their lives even if they don't know everything I do. It makes me want to help them all know everything I do! The churches were just covered with decorations. There was always so much to look at in them. When we went in them it was a nice place to rest from the heat and noise.

Here is one of the most famous Churches known as Karlskirche.

It was built because the emperor wanted the people to go worship after the plague because so many of their loved ones died. It was one of my favorites because on the outside is carved the desperation the plague brought but the inside was all about hope, which was shown through the pictures of Christ healing the people and Maria Theresa with the people. Isn't that cool? God does give hope! You see the top tower of the church? We got to go all the way up there! We got to stand right next to the beautiful mural on the roof! It was amazing. Here are some picture of the mural.

The most famous Cathedral in Vienna is St. Stephens. It has been there for a few hundred years and the people from the plague were buried in the rooms underneath it. They needed to put the many bodies somewhere. They needed more space for the new bodies so they made bone houses where they stack bones to make more room. The smell got so bad though that they weren't even able to have church there anymore! So they stopped putting the bodies down there. Casandra and I went down there and saw all the bones. It was super interesting. No pictures allowed though sorry. We all went up to the bell tower of the cathedral and saw the amazing view from up there.

Here is the inside of the Cathedral.

Here's the view

Selfie out front!

Schonbrunn Palace was the summer palace for the Empire. I got a tour of part of it and learned about some pretty cool things about it. My favorite part of it was the ballroom because I just pictured all of my favorite regency romance characters going to balls! It really was so fun! I want to go to a ball there. It was fun to picture what it would have been like to live back then. It was a ginormous building and even bigger backyard! It took us two different trips to the Palace to search it all. The flowers, trees, bushes, fountains, and buildings honestly I don't know what they did with so much land but it was beautiful. I could just picture them taking a stroll in the gardens. Oh my heart. It was lovely and beautiful. There were many people about running and walking almost like it was a public park. Which it kinda was. They had the oldest operating zoo in the world on the grounds. They had flamingos! That was my favorite! Honestly just look at these pictures it tells it better then I ever could.

A worn down monument

I just had to take a picture in this forest of trees.

Just look at that view! You can see St. Stephens Cathedral in the distance.

Pink Flamingos

Greenhouse

There is just so many more pictures but don't worry I picked the best ones. But looking at these pictures I realized that they just can't capture how really beautiful it was! Oh well I tried.

The Hofburg Imperial Palace is the main palace in Vienna and it is at least twice the size of Schonburnn. It was pretty cool to look at. The only thing I saw in that Palace was the library that looked like the one from Beauty and the Beast! It was magnificent! I wanted to know what was in each of the books and wondered what it would be like to have a library that big?! I wanted more info about the library but all the info on there was in German. So I didn't get to know all I wanted to but man it was a wonder to look at! Plus that's what the internet is for right?

There is another Palace known as the winter palace which is now a museum where they have famous paintings. The building is called Belvedere and it's also a beautiful place. The outside of it has statues on the top, on the side, on the grounds, and not just a couple--a bunch of them. The museum we went in had beautiful art, I can't believe that there are people out there, even in the 1700s, that have such amazing talent. The famous painting of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, Cassandra was more excited for that than I was! It was pretty awesome that we saw the actually painting in person. Anyway we saw Belvedere our last day in Vienna and I'm so glad we did!

One of the most magical places we visited was the Schmettling haus (aka the butterfly house) there were butterflies everywhere! It was like stepping into a fantasy land.  The scene before me was just amazing! I'm going to try to paint the picture for you. You are standing in the midst of trees, as you look about, you see hundreds of different butterflies landing on flowers, flittering around high and low. You hear water falling from a nearby waterfall. As you breathe in, you smell a mix of flowers, dirt, and heat. It was really amazing. I could spend hours there.

Do you see the butterfly?

Vienna is known for a couple different things. First it has a lot of musical history and still is a hotspot for music. Many of the classical musicians have a statue of them in the city and are buried in Vienna. Cassandra and I saw many of the beautiful statues of them and even decided to go to where they were buried to pay them our respects and such. Mozart is buried in a very old and now over-grown cemetery (there was a roots breaking some of the stone there was even a tree growing on a grave.) They aren't sure where he is buried so they just made a monument for him in the cemetery. It was super cool to walk through that cemetery. The others are buried in a HUGE cemetery all right next to each other. It was a beautiful spot and took us forever to find because we have a hard time finding things. We had a good time looking though. Anyways here are a couple pictures of the statues and cemetery.

Here is a statue of Beethoven

Here is a statue of Mozart

Here is a very famous statue of Strauss

Here is Beethoven's grave

Here are the famous composers graves.

Here is the monument to Mozart.

Here is an example of the really over grown graveyard.

Ice cream is another thing that Vienna is known for. As it should be, it is heavenly! The best ice cream I have ever tried has been in the last two weeks. They have just little ice cream shops tucked in wherever they can and they just have about 16 flavors. It's amazing! It's probably fair to assume that whenever we saw an ice cream shop we bought some. I can't really explain why it is so much better than other ice cream. I wish I could just bring some home for everyone to try it! My favorite flavor I had was some sort of blueberry flavor.

Cassandra has Mango and I got my favorite

The next thing they are known for is their wine and coffee, I can't tell you one way or the other if it really is the best wine or coffee as I didn't try any but I did try the hot chocolate. My oh my. It was like a cup of creamy chocolate, superb!

Here is me trying to figure out this sugar dispenser.

Prater is a very large park that even though it had an amusement park somewhere we had a very very hard time finding it. As I said, bad at finding where we want to go. Mostly we blamed it on the fact that we couldn't read German and the map didn't have a you-are-here dot, which are very useful things. So we wandered in a direction taking side paths here and there which led us through a forest of trees. I love walking among the trees so it was pretty enjoyable. While out searching, we stumbled upon probably the most fun park I think I have ever seen! It had a mini zip line for the kiddos, a huge slide that Cassandra and I went down, a four-way teter toter, and fun climb-on things. Oh and they had these two pretty cool swings farther away. The picture describes it better than I could. Anyway we finally did find the amusement park with the house Ferris wheel which is a land mark in Vienna and so we had to at least see it. We decided not to go on it because Cassandra doesn't like Ferris wheels. Instead we went on the water raft going down a slide ride. It looked fun and Cassandra did love it (I could tell because she laughed all the way down) I hated it because it just spun in circles which I hate! We had fun looking at all the rides and comparing them to the ones at Lagoon.

The cool swings I couldn't explain

The way fun slide we went down.

Here is the ride we went on

The famous Ferris wheel

In one of the books I read about cool things to see in Vienna was this Hunderwasser haus. It was a funky looking set of apartments. Which I honestly think is really cool looking. The different colors on the outside represent an apartment. Each of the apartments are different sizes and none look the same. Windows are located in weird places in the apartment some on the floor even. There are about 200 people that live in these 50 apartment today. I can't even imagine what they are paying to live there!   

That is mainly all of my Vienna adventures not including all the public transportation we took everyday, being exhausted at the end of everyday, the heat, and sitting down on a bench every hour because we just needed a break from the sun and walking! Vienna is nice that it does have a lot of benches though I probably just noticed that Vienna had a lot because I was always looking for one to sit down on. Haha. Many of their parks are just lined with benches which I think is such a great idea! I even found a cool-looking tree that I just could not resist climbing!

We took a mini trip Salzburg during our trip. We booked the train tickets, Sound of Music tour tickets (the whole reason we went to Salzburg), and a place to stay the night. Which it doesn't seem too bad when you have those things but figuring out where everything is located... well that's a whole different story. Just because you have a place to stay doesn't guarantee that you will be able to find it. Don't worry we did find where we were supposed to go. Finding the train to Salzburg from Vienna was easy! Once we were in Salzburg we looked at a map for a long time trying to figure it out before we went and asked the tourist info desk (wasn't that handy?) how to get to where the tour bus was supposed to pick us up. She was very helpful and even gave us the map! I told her she was the best and she laughed a little, I was serious though--she was the best. Map in hand, we felt we could conquer the world! It was pretty easy though we just walked straight on a road for 12 minutes. My phone was close to dying so we pulled up google maps to find where we were staying before it died so we could figure out where it was on the map we were given. We found it pretty easy on the map. Can't say we had an easy time figuring out how to orientate yourself according to the map. Online it said it would be a 15 minute walk from where we were to the Muffin Hostel where we were staying. It took us about 45--probably went the long route and missed a turn or two... but we made it and that's all that matters! We even did it sort of reading a map! It was a cute place! We loved it. The next morning we got lost some more even after we asked the guy at the desk how to get to where we were going and giving us another map!  We learned that we are awful at reading maps and getting lost is alright because it takes you to some interesting place you wouldn't have seen otherwise. Plus we ran into an old man that barely spoke any English, I think he said something about "we are humans first and nationality second" after he asked us what nationality we were. Nice guy!  He even gave us a European kiss! (Which is where they kiss you on both cheeks) It was pretty awesome.

Here is our Muffin Hostel! We sat outside the window and talked it was so fun.

Here is me taking a break from walking in the wrong direction but realizing how beautiful the view was from here.

Anyhoo, The Sound of Music tour was perfect! I got the chills so many times. It was fun to see many of the places where the movie was filmed as well as learning behind the scene facts about the movie. My favorite place we went to was the church where the wedding was filmed! Gorgeous church but the drive to the cute little town where the church is was even more stunning. The hills were just alive with the sound of music! Haha. We passed three different lakes on our way there. Bright blue, reflecting the mountains around it, and so many sail boats! Oh amazing. The garden where a lot of the Do Re Mi song was filmed was so fun to explore and repeat what the actors did so long ago. The Sound of Music tour was overall probably my favorite thing on this trip. Also I found out that Salzburg gets just so much of it money from tourists. There are about 10,000 people that live there and 33.000 people who come to visit Salzburg just because The Sound of Music was filmed there!? Isn't that just crazy. That movie is so well loved!

Part of the garden Do Re Mi was filmed in

Me reenacting what the characters did in the movie

One of the lakes we passed.

The cute town the church was in

The lake in the movie that they fell into

Inside the wedding church

The church

The gazebo in the movie

In the Do Re Mi song they all touch the head of a statue but there were so many in the garden that we didn't know which one so I just chose one to take a picture with.

Here is me on the bridge pointing just like in the movie!

While in Salzburg also was the "old town" which is basically an adorable, crowded street. On the street is the house that Mozart was born in. So I saw where Mozart's life started and where it ended. Isn't that interesting? We went into some more churches and saw a lock bridge. Where couples put their names on a lock, put it on the fence, kiss and then throw the key into the river! Isn't that adorable? When I find my man we will have to do that. Maybe we will just have to make our own lock bridge. Walking around we also found this slanted downward hill with water running down the middle of it, there were some plastic balls that kids could pick up at the bottom run them to the top and race them down. Cassandra and I had to try it out. It was SO fun!

There you go a pretty decent overview of most everything that happened with pictures to go with it! Only a short novel. Hope I didn't bore you too much! The 12 hour flight home and the jet lag made me never want to get on a plane again! But I'm grateful for planes that make trips like this one possible! I learned a lot of cool history and that I'm a capable young lady. Seeing another country was a great opportunity and opened my eyes. It was a trip of a lifetime! Thank you Vienna!