Day 156, 7 December 2012. Budapest (Hungary) to Vienna (Austria). Big kids that we are (remember... Not Being Grownups for a whole year) we still get a kick out of waking up in one country and going to sleep in another... especially when we get to go on the bus! (at last, an opportunity to edit this week's photos). We spent our final morning in Budapest getting every ounce of value from our hotel. We finally headed out for a spot of shopping - Cherry Palinka (love that word - can amuse myself by saying it over and over again...) Palinka is the local fruit brandy. The other necessity was a new necklace for moi - not even my fault this one as James saw it in the jeweller's window and pointed it out. Honestly, what's a girl to do? In any event, Christmas is coming and that helped the rationalisation of said purchase. It was time to go and we realised how small Budapest was as part of Hungary as we were soon on the highway to Austria. The landscape was wintry in the extreme - covered with yesterday's snow and the sun was shining through the clouds in massive slabs of illumination. We arrived to our ship "The Sound of Music" (cue Julie Andrews - the hills are alive....). Note well... Austria is apparently 80% mountains. Just not our bit. We were docked on the Danube and eventually settled in after playing musical cabins due to getting the premium "noxious gas" package in our first cabin. Eventually happy, though decidedly off colour, we attended the safety brief about what to do in the (highly unlikely) event of an emergency. Fortunately they provided glasses of bubbly to take the edge off the anxiety and after dinner it was off to Vienna's famous Rathaus Christkindl market. Gorgeous setting, loads of twinkling lights all very Christmassy - people were out and about with very definite shopping lists... decorations, mulled wine, gingerbread... etc. We had but one thing on our list... an ATM. A cash machine. A hole in the wall. It turns out in Austria they are called Bankomats and we finally found one right next door to Landtmann Cafe, much frequented by Sigmund Freud once upon a wine. (Oh go on. It took at least 2 glasses at dinner to come up with that slip). Fortunately for the budget by the time we actually had € in hand, there was no time to spend it - Brilliant strategy, non? Back to the ship. Sleepy bye byes due to horrendously early start slated for tomorrow - I'm not 100% sure... but they're feeding us around every 2.5 hours on board. We know Thanksgiving was a couple of weeks ago. Are they fattening us up for Christmas per chance? If the communiques cease around Christmas Day, remember.... just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.