Vienna

The last stop in our holiday was two nights in Vienna.  We went by train from Salzburg to Vienna, and then caught a taxi to our hotel.  I highly recommend the Starlight Suites in Vienna, they are recently refurbished suites and our room(s) was lovely.  After dropping off our bags, we went for a walk along the main shopping street and soon found the Sacher Hotel, which was one of the things on our list of places to see.  The Sacher Hotel is a fancy hotel, but is probably more famous for the "Original Sacher Torte" which is basically a fancy chocolate cake with apricot jam in it.  So of course we ordered this and I tried a Sacher Liquour, which seems to be a alcoholic chocolate syrup:
 
Yum!

We then continued walking around and found the St. Stephen's Cathedral:

The blue/grey area on the tower is actually scaffolding hidden by giant posters of what the tower looks like underneath, an ingenious way of hiding ugly scaffolding and still looking almost like it should.
That night we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant we found. It was hilarious as there was about five waiters and they all came and said hello to Charlotte and one took her on a tour of the restaurant, and then gave her a bread stick made from pizza dough:

When were eating our dinner they kept on coming over to say hello and ignoring the other customers!

The next morning we went for a walk to find the Spanish Riding School to watch morning practise (the shows are only on weekends and we were leaving on a Thursday).  They practise in a big hall which is essentially inside the palace (illegal photo):


After watching them go through their paces with lovely classical music playing for about an hour, we continued on our way and found Cafe Central.  Of course I made a joke about them copying Queanbeyan, but this one is a little bit older and fancier.  So we sat down for some yummy morning tea:


Then we found a butterfly house in the grounds of the Hofburg Palace. They were a little bit disappointing compared to ones we had seen in Australia before, I think we only saw about four butterflies!
We grabbed some lunch and went to find the Treasury which holds all the Austrian crown jewels. Of course they say that theirs are better than the British ones so they get more tourists, but they were pretty good:


On the way back to the hotel, Jo found a really nice shop. She had seen some people walking around with really fancy shopping bags, but didn't know where they were from. So when she saw a shop with the same sign we went to have a look, and it turned out to be a really nice baby clothes shop! Of course we had to buy some nice things so that Jo could get the nice shopping bag!
Just before we got back to our hotel we found a nice park across the road where sat in the sun for a while, and saw some strange sign that we can only assume means "Make sure you feed the evil looking rats so they get so fat and can't move":


That night we went to a Mozart dinner and concert and met an older Brazilian couple who loved Charlotte. I think the man must have held Charlotte for almost an hour all up, the strangest thing was when an asian lady came up and grabbed Charlotte off the Brazilian couple for a cuddle! We figured that was going too far!
Charlotte really enjoyed the concert and was trying to conduct the orchestra. When the opera singers were announced she decided to audition. Luckily everybody thought it was hilarious and gave her a round of applause. Since it was late, Jo decided to take Charlie home in the intermission. Overall it was a nice night, even if it is just for tourists:


The next day was our last day and we had to check out by 2pm, so we went out to Schonbrunn Palace for a quick visit. The Palace is about 20mins by train out of the city and is fairly large. We had a look around the State apartments, trying to manuver Charlotte's stroller around the hundreds of Italian school kids. It was a lovely, warm sunny day and every spare seat or patch of grass was full of the locals stretching out and exposing as much of themselves to the sun as possible. Very funny!
In the back of the Schonbrunn Palace grounds is the oldest zoo in the world. So we went and had a look. It was an awesome zoo probably better than Sydney's Taronga Zoo. There were all sorts of animals, but Jo really wanted to see the Giant Panda's. We had a bit of a worry when we couldn't see them, but it turns out they were inside chomping on bamboo:

One of the strangest things we saw was an enclosure that had some sort of monkeys in with some sort of goat, and one of the monkeys seemed to be milking a goat!!!


After the Palace we headed back to the hotel to checkout and then walked around the shops for a few more hours before heading out to the airport. After a little bit of fuss and lots of double checking all the tickets (so we didn't have the same problem as the way over) we hopped on the plane to start the journey home. Due to the way the trip was booked we had to fly through Helsinki, Bangkok, Sydney and home. So we got onto a FinnAir flight and were served a nice reindeer lunch!
We had thought we were leaving all the cold weather behind us when we got on the plane, so we packed most of our cold gear into the suitcases. Oops!
Turns out that in Helsinki our flight was one that you have to get off outside and catch a bus back to the terminal, except that outside was -4 degrees and snowing!!


Luckily we found enough jumpers and a small blanket to keep Charlotte warm, but we must have looked like idiots. We then had 20mins to walk from one side of the airport to the other to catch the flight to Bangkok and on home.
Here is Charlotte listening to some tunes on the way home:


Some more pictures of around Vienna are here:

Vienna