There’s no more efficient way to navigate a new city than with the help of a local. Luckily we had a few locals on our side that we’re more than willing to share their wealth of knowledge about Vienna. Bianca and all of her flatmates gave us so much great advice on how to best see the city. Bianca even escorted us to the train station and helped us obtain a city map and then sent us off on our own with a long list of things to see.
The first stop was a restaurant/brewery that was actually brewing beer. You could smell the barley and hops wafting across our table.
They had a delicious chili beer that was a tad bit spicy. Very tasty! Jay also tried their hemp beer. The schnitzel was highly recommended, so we ordered some as our main course after a delicious creamy garlic soup appetizer.
Almost all of the major sites in Vienna are located within “The Ring” and all easily accessible by foot once you are inside the ring. Our first destination was the Imperial Palace. Along the way I snapped a few photos of some of the many cool looking buildings in the city…
…and their reflections in other more boring buildings.
To get to the Imperial Palace, you have to walk past the Kunsthistorisches Museum and Naturhistorisches Museum…
…which have identical exteriors and face each other across a plaza.
After crossing by those two amazing buildings, we walked through the outer courtyard of the palace. Off in the distance you can see Rathaus which is where the mayor and city council of Vienna govern.
And on the other side is the palace itself.
There are some unruly individuals guarding the palace. This guy clearly doesn’t see the sign nearby that forbids this type of barbarian behavior!
Outside of the palace walls are some more friendly (and cuddly) guards.
Perhaps it’s because they only have to guard a church. Stephansdom is a huge church smack dab in the middle of The Ring…
…with lots of shopping nearby…
…and street performers.
If you ever have a chance to try the iced tea pictured above, do so. It was some of the best tasting and most refreshing iced tea I’ve ever had.
Our hosts were planning to make us a traditional Austrian dinner this evening, so we headed back to the flat. We had just enough time to check out the Technisches Museum before they closed. Here are just a few photos from their vast collection of stuff that does things. And stuff.
Something tells me I’m going to like it here in Vienna. When you get off a bus and they have clever ashtrays like this giant cigarette…
…you just sort of get the feeling that this is one of those cities that has some smarts about it. Sort of like Tokyo, only with trash receptacles.
Furthermore, our CouchSurfing host Bianca met us at the bus stop and gave us a personal escort back to her flat. I already feel like I’m at home! Even more so when we sat down to dinner with the flatmates for some crepes!
I also feel at home because as odds would have, there was a “secret concert” that night by the band Port O’Brien and they happen to be from our backyard in the bay area — Oakland, CA.
I had never heard of the band before, but they had a good energy about them. They really got the crowd into the show when they passed out pots and pans and various other noise makers for people to bang on to the rhythm of their hit song Woke Up Today.
So far, Vienna has really high marks… We’ll see what else the city has in store for us when we Wake Up Today tomorrow.
There’s nothing like soaking in a tub full of Hungarians to work up a good appetite! Similar to the Turkish Baths a few hours earlier, the other highly recommended place of interest was a pizza shop called Marxim.
Tucked away on a side street behind some abandoned communist warehouses, is this communist pizza parlor. The decor is all based on old items from the city’s communist past. Communist flags hung from barbed wire fences separated the booths.
And the walls were covered with lots of propaganda imagery.
The menu of Pizza’s played off the same theme with edible items like the Gordi Gorbi.
We ended up ordering a Pizza a la Ciolkovskij
(cheese, red beans, hot meat, sauce, parika, sweetcorn)
and
Antivegetarian (Lajka’s favorite)
(cheese, ham salami, corn, bacon, tomator slices)
And the pizza’s where delicious! They are served along side a vile of extra tomato sauce too. Mmmmm.
Once all the pies were devoured we slapped some forint down on the table to pay for the meal and headed home for our last night in Budapest.
Bonus Content Alert!!
In the bottom corner of the menus was this gem:
Marxim is 17 years old. Our next Five-Year Plan:
This year we will plan which plan indicators and index numbers will predominate as the following year’s target figures with regards to the data which will come to fruition in four years time and should give us a quota for the fifth year. A word to the wise! A recommendation from the municipal health-officer: under communism a person’s cells and suspicious (as opposed to those of the party) die and are never regenerated.
Anything else is very bad taste and new to every 5 year old.
Ugh. Not feeling so great this morning, but probably not quite as bad as this guy.
I don’t smell to good either. I smell like an ashtray. Probably because last night we spent some time inside a club called Cha Cha Cha, which I think in Hungarian translates to Cough Cough Cough. The haze you see in this photo is actually cigarette smoke. I thought I had built up a decent tolerance to lung cancer in Greece, but apparently not. This place had no ventilation and I think we were the only 3 people in there without a stogie hanging from our lip. We were really only in there for about 30 minutes, but it certainly took it’s toll on me. Luckily I have a backup lung.
After wiping the soot from my eyes this morning, and once I was able to see again, we headed down to Fatal for some lunch. A very generous helping of beef goulash! Along with some cold cucumber salad, just the way mom used to make it.
With some thick stew lining my gut, I was starting the get back into the swing of things and resuming normal health status. So it was off to parlay our way into the Parliament building.
We arrived at the building in the late afternoon and jumped in line to buy tickets. After waiting for about 15 minutes one of the guards came over and put up a sign saying there were no more tickets for the day! Crap! Now how are we going to get in!? Not ones to give up so easily, we noticed a large guided tour of people around our age still gathering near the entrance, all seemingly ignoring the newly displayed ticket sign. They must know something we don’t know, and we had every intention to find out exactly what it was! It wasn’t a moment sooner when they all starting filing through the chain fence into the courtyard of the building. So being the chameleons that we are we blended in with the crowd and scurried into the courtyard with our new found tour group. Once inside the building however…
…some of the other members of the tour started taking extra long looks at us. It didn’t help that we didn’t speak (or for that matter look) Italian. Shit. Our cover was blown! So we slinked off up some stairs to join another tour. This time it was a group of German’s. Apparently we look a lot more like 55 year old German tourist than we do 25 year old Italian tourists because we were able to resume the rest of the tour undetected with this new group.
In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the brightest of ideas. Sort of like sneaking into the White House or something. But we came all the way from California dammit! We weren’t about to be denied entrance when other people were clearly allowed in.
Feeling pretty good about getting out of their without any run-in’s with the law, we decided to go celebrate in true hero fashion at Hero’s Square.
Due to a curve ball in our travel plans we arrived last night in Budapest last night. Turns out that our EURail pass isn’t valid in Bulgaria. So our original plan to take the train from Thessaloniki Greece to Sofia Bulgaria is a no-go. Instead we boarded a plan in the outskirts of Thessaloniki bound for Budapest. Good thing Jay was wearing his travel suit that day because we just barely made it to the airport on time! In fact we were cutting it so close that we had to sneak past the preliminary security line in order to make our plane on time.
Anyways, as I said… we are now in Budapest. Well, Pest to be exact. And due to some favorable circumstances with a technical glitch in a hostels calendering system, we have a large furnished apartment here all to ourselves! Score!
Last night we went hunting for some food and came across a Cuban restaurant on some unlit backstreet. The menu looked good, and decor looked classically Cuban so we decided to give it a go and headed down the stairs to the restaurant below.
As soon as we were seated, we were quickly approached by a tall gorgeous woman carrying a tray of ruby red shots. She started off on her sales pitch in Hungarian which sounded just as beautiful as she looked. When she finished, we politely explained that we are idiots who can’t speak Hungarian. She laughed and luckily repeated the whole shpeel in English. As expected, she was there promoting a new drink. It was a new variety of a classic Hungarian liquor. She offered us a round on the house, and despite hearing horror stories of people in foreign countries waking up with missing organs after a free round of drinks, we threw caution to the wind and downed a round. It tasted a lot like cinnamon and was a bit warming, which was nice since the weather outside was quite brisk (and somehow I lost my jacket in Greece). After chatting with the girl for a while about things to do/see in the city, our waiter brought over our first course, a beef chili soup covered in a cheesey blanket.
It was scrumptious! And really hit the spot, getting us warmed up for the main course:
A stuffed chicken concoction on a bed of pasta. Holy crap was that tasty! The portion was enormous, so we bagged up half of it and headed home. This morning it was even more tasty as brunch!
After devouring our leftovers we grabbed our trusty map and headed out, leaving Pest in the dust to explore the Buda side of the river.
We hiked up the hillside of Buda for about a half hour or so, stopping to take a few photos along the way. Here’s on the the royal palace, and off in the distance in Pest you can see the dome of the Parliament building.
