Vienna – Take Three

On my return from Brno, I once again had a one nighter in the wonderful, money-sucking city of Vienna. I had planned to catch up with Charlie for a drink but nothing huge as I had to be on the bus at 8am the following morning. When I had arrived and checked into the hostel, I had a real shower as I had been rushing my showers for the last three days in Brno due to the fact that it was all communal. After washing 4 days on sweat and sunscreen out of my hair I called Charlie to see what she was up to. Charlie and two French dudes from her hostel were at Schonnbrunn, the Habsburgs summer palace. I had wanted to see this place due to it having a hedge maze in the grounds and I’d always wanted to do one of them, so I got on a tram and went to meet them at the palace.

The Habsburgs were terribly over the top, drunk on their own power and married within their family to preserve the purity of their own bloodline, resulting in a litany of retarded offspring, but holy moly, they sure know how to build a palace! Schonnbrunn is gorgeous. The palace is nice enough, but the grounds are truly astounding. I was walking around, thinking “yeah, this is all nice and palacey”, and then I walked around a corner and looked up the manicured gardens behind the palace, leading all the way up the hill and had to stop and say “whoa”. How very Keanu Reeves of me…

After walking around the gardens I met up with Charlie and the two French dudes, Ivan and Vincent. We went to the Hedge Maze, which was very fun, even though it was nowhere near long enough, and not terribly difficult. It was very fun getting to the lookout point in the middle first, and then looking at the other walking around and giving them false directions. After that we all played around with some other stuff in the garden area, such as a xylophone thing that you work with your feet, and some stepping stones that shoot out water as you try to run across them, before making our way out of the Palace.

Charlie came back to my hostel as she needed to use the internet to book her next hostel in Budapest, while Ivan and Vincent went home. After Charlie and I had eaten and she had sorted her hostel, I walked her back to her hostel along Mariahilfer Strasse, getting some fantastic Gelato along the way.

I came back to my hostel with designs of having a quiet night pottering around on the internet and doing my washing. All those was going to plan until I got a call from Charlie telling me to come out to the Travel Shack, where she was meeting the Ivan and Vincent. I decided I might as well, as I hadn’t had a big night in a while after putting a lot of deposits in the sleep bank while in Brno. We got to the travel shack at midnight and Ivan and Vincent were already smashed. Ivan could barely stand up and Vincent was attempting to dirty dance with anyone who walked past, be they male or female. After another wonderful little creature and a jagerbomb, Charlie found a map of Budapest and I went through some cool places for her to go.

I was only going to walk with Charlie up to the first Kebab stand, as I was hungry, but when we got to the main intersection there was a guy who had been in a fight, so I decided that I should walk with her the whole half hour back to her hostel as it didn’t seem as safe as I had originally thought. I got myself a bratwurst along the way and was actually quite enjoying walking through Vienna in the middle of the night when the streets are empty of people. After dropping Charlie back at her hostel, I made the long trek back to my own, finding the French guys out the front, having just been dropped off by the taxi, and still being wildly drunk.

By the time I actually got to bed, it was 4:30am and the sun was coming up. I had to get up in 2 hours, hence the 21euro I had paid for a bed would work out to be 10.50 euro per hour. Vienna is still trying to suck money from my wallet, but I actually had a really good night, so even though I feel like someone scrubbed my eyeballs while I sit here on the bus to Salzburg, I refuse to have my good mood depleted.