We took another comfortable train for our shortest journey yet, between Vienna and Budapest. The journey was just under three hours and, true to form, Sara managed to sleep most of the way. We had the usual confusion at the station trying to sort out finding a city map, local currency and travel cards before taking the metro to our hotel. Oli’s misplaced map-reading optimism led us in the wrong direction for a while, but we got there in the end!
We made our usual mistake of judging a city from what we saw on the journey between the train station and our hotel; all we could see were building sites and slightly dilapidated streets. However, the hotel was comfortable and clean, and we took advantage of the free refreshments on arrival. As usual, we managed to lock the safe with the wrong code…although this time it really was a safe with no instructions and a mind of its own! We’d read about a pedestrian street with lots of good food options and it turned out to be very close to our hotel, so we took a stroll there to get some dinner. It was all lit up and had a lovely atmosphere, really buzzy. We had some tasty and very hearty goulash soup to start, and were full before our main course arrived!
We had an early start to get to the Naschmarkt, a market that we’d heard was worth visiting on a Saturday. It was really nice but fairly quiet at first and we had a tasty bakery breakfast before wandering around. The market got busier and busier and we were glad that we had come early so that we could explore properly. There were lots of produce stalls selling very interesting foods as well as an absolutely enormous flea market. We bought ourselves a picnic lunch for later, including a looooong flatbread that was almost as tall as Oli (okay, not quite), some sundried tomatoes and a bottle of Sturm, a cloudy, partially fermented wine. When we were standing at the stall trying to work out what people were buying that was so popular, a friendly passerby explained to us that it was ‘wine before finish’. So from then on, that’s how we referred to it. Catchy!
We then moved on to the legendary Sacher Cafe to try some Sacher torte, which was tasty but not the best ever (perhaps that’s controversial). While there, we discovered that the Sturm bottle was eager to be drunk and had spilled in Sara’s rucksack, so we popped back to the hotel to clean up and decant some provisions for later on.
After this minor detour, we ate our picnic in one of the parks in the city centre. We began a self-guided walking tour (from the Lonely Planet – are you sensing a theme?) and although we thought we’d be repeating our steps in some places, the tour pointed out lots of things that we hadn’t noticed before. For example, on the main pedestrian street there was an old tree which was full of nails, banged in by blacksmiths for luck when they were leaving the city in the 16th century. We’d passed this several times but were oblivious to the history, so it was well worth following the tour for these interesting nuggets of information.
In the late afternoon, we took a tram out to the suburbs to visit a wine tavern. As it was a bit of a journey out of the city, we hadn’t been sure whether it would be worthwhile, but we were really pleased we bothered. The tavern was in a beautiful old yellow-walled monastery and we sat outside in the courtyard, with music playing and vines overhead. The wine was produced there and so of course we tried a few glasses. We liked the simple way they kept track of what we’d drank, with a tally slip on our table, although we didn’t manage to rack up a very impressive total! The whole area really contrasted with central Vienna, and we enjoyed seeing where people actually lived and relaxed – it was very green and quiet.
After a few glasses of wine we took a tram back into the city, and laughed because we were both thinking the same thing – the outer shell of the trams reached the ground making them look like Dougal from the Magic Roundabout! Oli also thought it looked like they were powersliding when they went round corners. As we disembarked the tram, we spotted a George doppelgänger and took some probably none-too-subtle photos as evidence (we reviewed them the next morning and concluded that it wasn’t just the wine and they really did look uncannily alike)!
Viennese George
We then jumped on the metro to see the Riesenrad (Vienna’s famous fairground wheel), which turned out to be in a fully-fledged theme park. The wheel was expensive to get on and didn’t look very thrilling (although pretty to watch), so we decided to spend our pennies on a few other rides. Best of all were the chair-o-planes which travelled 117m in the air (think about it, that’s pretty high!) and gave us a beautiful view, albeit one that was rather windy and cold. Sara was quite scared so had a few good gulps of Sturm afterwards to steady her nerves. She then promptly fell over while crouching to take a photo, right in the path of a very bemused man. Time for bed! Our busiest day yet and great fun.
We left the hotel without eating (we couldn’t justify spending €20 of our precious budget on a hotel breakfast) and eventually found a supermarket after wandering around the local area getting increasingly desperate – Oli without food is not a good start to the day! We then hopped on the metro once again with the intention of getting a tram around the Ringstrasse road which encircles the city centre, as recommended in our guide book. And here started our tram adventure! The number 2 (which LP said would follow this route) did a bit of the circuit, and then took us off into the outskirts of the city before we quite realised what was happening. At this point we had to hop off and eat some emergency chocolate rations! We got back into the city on the number 2 and then spotted a tram called a Ringtram. ‘Ah, this must be it!’ we thought. We hopped on, only to discover it wasn’t public transport and we had no intention of buying tourist tickets on top of our travel cards. So that didn’t work out either! We then got onto the number 1 tram (another LP recommendation), which took us around the other half of the Ringstrasse but then also veered off. Finally, we hopped on a number 62 to get back to the centre, convincing ourselves we’d done it all on purpose to see the ‘real’ Vienna!
Wham, bam, thank you tram
We then had our packed lunch in the Hofburg Palace Gardens and after completing a full lap of the building, we finally found the entrance. It was at this point that we decided that although we liked Vienna, Vienna didn’t like us! We bought our tickets to the Hofburg and commenced the most boring audio tour we have ever been on! The first exhibit was an hour-long tour of the Imperial silver collection, which was basically endless place settings for different state occasions. We’ve never seen so much crockery! Our need for completeness had struck again – we realised afterwards that we could have skipped that exhibit and moved straight onto the Sissi museum, which was the main attraction. This was about a famous Empress who appeared to suffer from undiagnosed depression and became a recluse, surrounded by luxury. It was really sad but totally fascinating. We also toured the Imperial apartments, which were great. We left blinking in the sunlight feeling like we’d been back in time and were now back in the real world.
Next, we visited a Lonely Planet-recommended coffee house. LP was back in our good books because this was great, not at all touristy but just as you would imagine an old-fashioned Viennese coffee house. Oli accidentally ordered an espresso instead of his usual mocha, but really enjoyed it. Meanwhile, Sara busily ate the entire contents of the bowl of sugar lumps.
We then walked back through the centre to an outside noodle bar we’d seen whilst on our tram adventure and had a really yummy, cheap dinner. We fancied stopping for a drink but found that the prices were high and the staff were not very welcoming in the fancy central area, and then Sara got a stomach ache so we went home to bed instead.
