Schonbrunn

We woke up to Nathalie making us a wonderful pancake breakfast. Do you know how nice it is to travel and have the luxury of waking up to a nice breakfast? It's incredible!

Then Nathalie came with us to a copy shop literally next door to her flat. She spoke to the people in German and helped me figure out how to get online, print a reply form I needed to fill out, scan it, and email it back to the States. That would have taken me FOREVER to figure out how to do by myself using chirades. I really lucked out having her by my side and being so close to a copy shop.

With that errand done, Nathalie went to go get ready for school and Laura and I headed off to go see the Schonbrunn. It is the #1 thing countless people have recommended to us, but they all said only go if it's sunny weather. Well, today was gorgeous. Not a cloud to be forecast, and it was predicted to be 56 degrees fahrenheit. A long sleeve shirt should do the trick - but at 56 degrees I didn't think of sunscreen. That turned out to be a mistake. I now have super touristy sun burn lines where my backpack was all day. LAME. And Laura has a white strip across her nose. And of course my face looks a little like a tomatoe. Oh well.

The Schonbrunn was WAY easier to find that the Schloss Nymphenburg so Austria: 1, Germany: 0 haha. I loved it. It was so beautiful. And it was so huge that if you wandered to the right places, you didn't feel like there were a million tourists there.

The gardens, flowers, sculpted trees, scultped statues, fountains - everything was just gorgeous in our perfect-weather day. We paid 2.4 Euros to go in the kid part of the garden. We did a maze, a labrynth, and played some kid games and with some kid toys. We like acting like small children...Then we walked around for a few hours. It all looks the same in a way but it was so pretty that didn't really matter. We walked up to the Glorietta, which is a kind of panoramic viewpoint where you can look down at the Schonbrunn palace. You can also walk behind some of the huge fountains there and it feels like you are behind the scenes! It was a really incredible sight.

We met up with Nathy at a restaurant named Kolar that Meredith recommended to me. She told me they had good beer and good flatbread sandwiches, and she was not lying! The beer I got was darker and suprisingly sweet, but really good. And the flatbread (pita) sandwich I got had melted cheese, sour cream, ham, and asparagus on it. It sounded interesting and a little unusual so I ventured slightly out of my comfort zone and went for it. It was great!!! And so filling! In Vienna, everything moves pretty slowly, so our late lunch took about 2 leisurely hours. Then we moved locations to this great people-watching indoor cafe connected to a hotel. Nathy told us that we had to try this amazing chocolate marmalade cake (no complaints there) and of course I wanted to get some coffee with it :) I drink way more coffee when I'm in Europe. The cake was a bit dry but the 'crust' was chocolate and it had layers of apricot marmalade in it to help with the dryness. It was quite yummy, and by the time I'd finished that and my coffee I was stuffed! I tried to share with Laura so that we would each only have half but Nathy made us each order our own :)

Over coffee and cake and people watching while looking out at the Stephensdom we talked a lot about the difference in coffee and physical education between the U.S. and Austria. It is little things like that which makes conversing with CouchSurfers so much fun and so educational. Really sharing minute, random things about your culture. It's always fun to see what I can teach other people, what they don't know or what they thought they knew about our culture sometimes surprises me. It is really enjoyable to give them other points of view and some other facts so that they can alter their perceptions. CouchSurfing is great :)

Eventually it got to be around 6 PM and Nathy had plans to go to a movie. Laura and I didn't feel like going so Nathy walked us to the U-Bahn stop. On our way, we passed by the gorgeous Opera building and inquired about 4 Euro day-of tickets that you can get! We might do that another day. By the way, they have tons of paid men dressed up in fantastic costumes out and about in the touristy areas to sell Opera tickets. They are a lot of fun to watch :) Then Nathy showed us the "Opera Toilet". That is the WC in the Opera U-Bahn stop. It plays Opera music and the wallpaper looks like an opera house. It is really hilarious, probably the most amusing WC I've ever seen!

Laura and I had a quiet night at Nathy's flat during which I got super caught up with blogs, pictures, random CouchSurfing stuff, etc. It feels so good to finally not be behind!!


Quotes:
None today :/

Accomplishments:
Found the hole-in-the-wall restaurant that Meredith recommended to me!

Travel Tip:
Maybe if you look up the weather and see that it's going to be pure sunny the whole day and you're planning on walking around outside you should consider putting on some sunscreen. Maybe.


I feel like there is so much to do in Vienna! We are planning on leaving Monday but I'm not really sure if that will happen...