Day 17
Tuesday 18 Aug
0930 (19Aug)
We had the day to ourselves in vienna, but first we had a driving tour and went to shmegran (I think thats what it's called) palace. The driving tour was great, the whole city oozes culture and the old buildings are kept in such good repair. The CBD area seems to be located in a different spot too which meant there were no modern buldings in the labirynth of palaces and opera houses.
The Palace was huge and the gardens were the most Beautiful i'd ever seen. The whole place reminded me of the alice in wonderland scene with the Croquet and the People sized playing cards. We had 30 minutes to have a look around. 15 minutes later I hadn't even covered a fraction of the grounds and had to walk back. From the back of the palace I thought I could see my way to the front court yard I figured I could save myself 5 minutes by cutting through. The short cut wasn't short at all and probably added 5 minutes to the walk. My path snaked through the palace, the whole time everyone walking the other direction to myself. Finally I got to the front door and had to walk backwards past the lines of people who were queued to pay to do the walk that i'd just done but the other way found. Turns out I'd saved myself an extra 10 Euros.
We got on the Bus, every one late, again, and went into the city. Myself George and Jack went to grab a coffee. George isn't on a budget and i'm not too stingy so we grabbed a couple of the most expensive coffee's i've ever had while jack chewed on the sugar sachets.
I left them and went to search for a Sim card. This was bloody hard with the whole language barrier, its so frustrating, but I eventually got one with T-mobile. I did a bit of shopping too. I wanted to get a nice shirt for the concert we were going to that night.
I found an internet cafe and sat myself in there. The place was good but a little expensive, 2.9 Euro for 15 mins, but I sat down anyway. The place was full of a loud bunch from the contiki tour but the hardest thing about this cafe was the damn German keyboards. The shift is in a different spot and the y and z keys are swapped around, all the puntuation was different too and in there place were all vowels that they have with the dots on them. I gave up trying ot work it out pretty quickly and just wrote like It was a regular keyboard. It did look pretty funny though.
I then went and sat in a cafe for about an hour to work on my diary which I hadn't touched in a few days. The cafe was awesome. Immediately after sitting down a wet tea towel was brought out for me and the coffee was beautiful.
Unfortunately I had to leave not to long after to go and meet the bus to go to the Schnapps Museum. We waited for 10 minutes for Jack and George to show up, But it turned out those dumbasses had gone to the total wrong spot so we left with out them.
The Schnapps museum was a crack up.The guy who ran it was the biggest alcoholic i'd met in my life and i'm pretty sure he was drunk. The first room was just an office, but it had been maintained as it was since 1914 and had a working cash register that was 95 years old.
The next room was where he went through all their different liquers and schnaps that they do. He explained how absinth was made and was full of jokes. The whole time was really just a long sales pitch but it was definitely worth it. At the end he explained that the bar was ladies first and that he wanted all the men to stay around for a puzzle. He held out a bottle it was called “rene pogel”. We just looked at it slightly confused. He told us to read it back wards. Haha.
We all stood around in the bar for probably almost an hour. 3 different shots were included in the tour. I tried the fire schnaps first. It was powerful and quite sweet but didn't compare to the absinth. The 60% alcohol really hit the palete. I didn't mind it but it had to be sipped very very slowly. Finally I tried one called bitter. This one had no sugar and was a bit like a whiskey. I sipped it slowly while the other boys finished off the left over shots.
From the museum we were going to a classical music concert. We arrived early and got changed on the bus, first the girls and then us boys. This was dumb, it shold have been the other way around. Before the concert 9 of us had opted to do the dinner. It was an awesome 3 course meal. Tomato soup, a veal cutlet and a strawberry thing at the end. The wine was good too. We couldn't work out why but for some reason it was cheaper to buy by the glass then by the bottle.
In the concert I couldn't sit with the rest of the group. I didn't mind I was placed with 2 brittish girls so I tried to make small talk. They were nice enough just not very interesting. Maybe if I had a knowledge of classical music and played the harp, as one of them did, the conversation would have been a little smoother. After the break they shuffled to try and get a better view. I was left with the dad sitting beside me, he was much more fun to talk to however maybe not quite as pretty on the eyes.
The concert was good, it was just quite long, it was also really hot inside and we were all sweating quite a lot. The intermission couldn't come soon enough and we all moved out onto the balcony to sip the free champagne. There was another hour after the intermission of dancing singing and music, I was just too tired and it was too hot for me to enjoy it properly.