Mostly Mozart, and that's it in Vienna.

City 2: Vienna.

Hostel Huttledorf was our destination. Sarah had the metro directions, so from our night train from Berlin towards the Harry Potter Hostel we went.

It took forever to get to the metro stop. Hostel Huttledorf was way outside the center of the city, and much to our dismay, on top of a giant hill. The metro station was at the bottom, of course.

We huffed and puffed our way up a very scenic road lined with old Vienna apartments decorated in pastels to our new home for the next 3 nights. It was a cute looking building with lots of younger kids running around it. Someone was sweeping the tiny rocks off the cobblestone driveway area. He gave up after a while, realizing it made absolutely no difference.

We got to our room, and found it to be homey enough. The beds were pretty much foam sheets on top of wood, and I think they forgot to give us pillows with the pillow cases, or maybe they thought that the pillow cases were in fact pillows, but we couldn't complain seeing as it was seriously cheap. We dropped our things off and headed out to hear the singing hills of Austria.

There's got to be something really cool in Vienna, people go there all the time and say they love it; we just couldn't find it.

We spent lots of money going in and out of lots of museums (which was very educational and interesting now that I look back on it), but we didn't find free entertainment en route like Berlin. We couldn't find a 4 hour tour to take, we couldn't find open air markets, the bottom floors of buildings weren't open with stores, bars, or cafés, and people that were dressed up as Mozart kept trying to get us to go to costly concerts every night. Even if we wanted to go to the concerts, they would have been impossible to find in the expansive labyrinth that is Vienna.

We did however have a picnic. We did visit pretty cool art museums. We did walk around the old Hapsburg residence and saunter through their much cropped gardens.





We did wander into a crafts expo - there was lots of lederhosen, lots of wood cutting, and lots of bratwurst.



We accidentally hiked up a mountain that took us outside of Vienna to have cheesecake, apple strudel, and traditional Viennese coffee called the "mélange", which had THE BEST foam on top of it I've ever ingested.










One of Vienna's biggest marathons was going on while we were staying there. They set up stations with big-screens and PA systems with techno music blaring from the speakers at different points in the city, so we stopped and watched the spectacle for a while. Most of the runners were over 40, so we figured Vienna was kind of boring due to the population being primarily older. I’m not sure if that’s true, so if you’re from Vienna and you’re reading this please don’t be offended, it just seemed like the population is older from what we saw…





We also ate the famous "Vienna tort", which wasn't as great as it looked. A little dry, I'd give it an 8 on a 1-10 scale, and I would definitely not pay the same price for the same slice again.



When our little group of American students first came to France, we were forced to sit through a bunch of orientation meetings. For one of these delightful meetings, our school brought in a psychiatrist to talk about the different stages of culture shock, and the possible hurdles of situating one's self into a new country over a long period of time. She talked about cats, used profane words, and scared the shit out of us, to be perfectly frank. She shattered all dreams of becoming fluent in French over the 4 ½ months we were going to be in Paris, and she even drew out a diagram that mapped our projected levels of depression over the course of our stay. The diagram starts out as a straight line, then rapidly slopes to a low point on the page, and stays there for a while. Most of us laughed uncomfortably, telling each other that this lady was absolutely insane and had been an ex-pat for way too long, but I think she kind of set all of us all up for a giant fall when some of us didn’t have a breakdown in our future to begin with. I think some of us have willingly jumped from our straight line of emotional stability – and I think Sarah and I were two of those people who held our noses and leaped in Vienna.

It may have been the fact that I locked my keys in my locker with all my stuff in it and had to cut it off with a lock-cutter personally, it may have been that we spent most of our time wandering around Vienna in frustration, surrounded by too many people who wore too much perfume and cologne (one of the top stand-out traits of Vienna), or it may have been that we couldn’t find any wiener-schnitzel in the land of wiener-schnitzel, but Vienna most definitely marks the bout of complete discontent in our international adventures. We simply could not wait for Rome.