Day 1 - Vienna - 23 Sep 2016

Our 2nd honeymoon, sans kids.

After surviving at least 15 hours of flight (Singapore to Zurich to Austria), we arrived at the Austrian airport at about 12 noon.

We took a cab to our hotel - Austria Trend Hotel Europa Wien - which cost us an exorbitant amount of EUR 45. Half an hour later, we reached the hotel and thank God, we were allowed to check-in to our room.

The first and the best thing for the missus to do was to take a shower to freshen up. As for me, I attempted to doodle with the Skyroam wifi router that we rented. However, the initial excitement turned into anger when I realised that the wifi router wasn't working well with my Android phone. While determined to almost spend the next few hours (before the driver for our Vienna City Tour + Schonbrunn Palace picked us up at 2pm), my wife was wise to intervene and gave me the perfect solution to send an enquiry to Skyroam, which I was glad that I heeded her advice as it was pointless to spoil the trip because of an incompetent wifi router. Haha. Anyway, the long and short was after some exchanges of text messages with Skyroam, they managed to resolve the problem and Voila, the wifi router was working. Yeah!

We went for a quick bite at a nearby supermarket where a small section of it was dedicated for a buffet-styled kind of lunch. After lunch, we walked and looked around the shops near our hotel but we got back in time at 2pm for our city tour.

The driver came half an hour late though. But well, at least he came. He took us in a mini van and picked up other passengers along the way. We then changed to a bus (with more tour participants) and it was on this bus that the tour commenced proper with the tour guide explaining to us the various background and history of the Baroque and Medieval buildings as the bus meandered around the city.

After circling around the city for almost an hour, we alighted at Schonbrunn Palace. The area was huge with a large square, with some beautiful fountains, that separated between the main entrance and the entrance to the palace. The palace was inviting and it caused me to wonder what were the gems that could be found within the palace. While we could be lost if we were to wander around the palace ourselves, we were thankful to the guide for not only showing us around but also explaining to us the different things that we saw. The paintings and the artefacts - they all made sense. Well, a little understanding of its history made me appreciate the tour a bit more. One incredible story that the guide mentioned was regarding one of its earlier ruler, Marie Theresa. She gave birth to 16 children - all single birth. We were 8 times worse than her. Haha.

We had almost an hour before we reunited with the rest of our fellow tour participants. During the free and easy hour, we took pictures at its enchanting garden. The tour officially ended at about 6pm when we were dropped off at the Opera House.

We went to Edvard for dinner - a one-starred Michelin restaurant. Needless to say, the food was fantastic but as we were fighting jetlag, the time that we had to wait in-between the course was quite unbearable.

We took an Uber car back to hotel. It was only EUR 5. Upon reaching our hotel, and after changing to a more comfortable wear and ensuring that our phones were plugged in to charge, we went to bed almost immediately at 930pm (330am Singapore time). Totally deadbeat.