Vienna - It's A Classy Place

It's the end of our second and final day in Vienna, Austria, and I must say I'm pretty impressed!  It's definitely a different kind of impressive than Budapest or Prague, though Vienna is still loaded with the obligatory giant cathedrals.

Not bad.  Not bad at all.

Apparently this is the guy who designed the cathedral...
I guess this is the architectural equivalent of a photobomb?

Probably the most significant difference between Vienna and the other cities that we have visited is just sheer population.  While Munich, Prague, and Budapest were all very densely populated cities, Vienna is just straight up packed full of people.  Germans, Austrians, Americans, other Europeans, they're all just crammed in there like Japanese commuters on a subway.  And the worst part?  It's freakin' impossible to tell who is who. Everyone looks and dresses exactly like you would expect to see in New York or San Diego, so you have no way of knowing if the person you're about to ask for directions is a visiting American, friendly Austrian, or angry tourist-hating native person who will stare at you like you just stepped on her dog when you just wanted to ask what kind of beer they serve at the little restaurant in the farmer's market that you went to with your family...stupid mean waitress...

This farmer's market.  That story was about me.  If you couldn't tell.

Anyways, this is confusing, though it also leads to some extraordinarily random situations.  We came across a major example of this yesterday, while checking out one of the main shopping areas.  As can be expected, this street was filled with people, animals, and street performers

Also, for some reason, the "human statue" people in Europe
all use a squeaky-dog-toy sound, instead of the American
boardwalk-staple robot whirring noise

And lined with really expensive shops and cafes:

Even window shopping here is expensive.

Desperate to find some place where we could sit and drink things loaded with either caffeine or alcohol, we got ourselves a seat at one of the street-seating cafes that are ridiculously common in Vienna.  We passed the time talking and people watching, taking particular interest in the large number of dogs that walked past with their owners.  When confronted with a giant fluffy dog being walked next to a tiny little runt of a pup, my grandma decided to ask the owners what kind of dog it was.  Turns out, it was an Akita, and the little one was a mutt, but that's not the important part of the story: the important thing was that not only were the owners Americans, but they actually turned out to be from Solana Beach, about 10 minutes from where I live! The guy with the Akita apparently works at the US embassy in Vienna, and the other couple they were with were visiting from San Diego...probably the second most ridiculous "small world" moment I've ever experienced, only topped by the time that I ran into a high school friend while walking through St. Peter's Basilica in Rome on our last Europe trip, 5 years ago.

So yeah, that was pretty crazy.  As for the rest of our time, we got to stay at a suuuper nice hotel, with a stocked, FREE minibar and a whole room and fold-out couch to myself!

Found these weirdos wandering the street outside.

This morning was spent touring the huge Shonbraun (sp?) castle, historic home to the Hapsburg family...yes, that Hapsburg family, for all of you who took AP Euro.  The castle was really cool, despite a rather awkward moment on the walk in when I got this unfortunate angle on one of the big fountains out front:

Yeah...and my dad was the one who pointed this out.

The castle was great and all, but really the highlight of the whole thing was this cheeky-ass duck:

He just rolled up to us and was siting right at our feet, staring us right in the eyes and daring us to try to go swimming in his fountain.  I knew when to back down, so we survived the day.

I guess the gardens were cool too.

After a return  to the hotel, and a trip up and down the stairs to try to work off our excessive breakfast buffet, we were ready to head out again.

These stairs.  This is actually how the stairs in our hotel look.

We found our way over to this giant flea market/farmer's market thing for some lunch...this was pretty cool, since it was quickly made clear to us that this was a spot frequented by real Austrian people, not just tourists.  Unfortunately, this also meant that a lot of them didn't speak much English, or were kind of annoyed when they had to.  Therefore, the story mentioned above with the waitress.  I did, however, manage to work in one short German-language conversation with a vendor at the flea market, which pretty much consisted of me asking how much a kitchen knife was, then nodding appreciatively while he rattled off a bunch of long German words, then walking away.  Good enough for me!

Also, I just need to note how ridiculous this flea market was.  The people there were clearly, in many  cases, just selling random crap that they had found or stolen: for example, there was one guy selling two obviously-not-legitimately-obtained car radios among an assortment of glassware and cups.  Another vendor had a box on his table filled with, I kid you not, metal nameplates peeled off the backs of cars ("ACCORD", "CIVIC", "CAMRY", those things).  And there were about a thousand similar vendors, all peddling their own brand of random shizer.

Apparently you would have loved this place, Noah.

After losing my Grandpa for about an hour, then finding him wandering through another part of the market, we decided it was time to get somewhere less crowded, and walked to a nearby park.  There was another giant church here, though the admission fee kept us from wandering in.  There were some pretty epic angel statues out front, though:

Also, definitely found the broken finger from this statue sitting
on the stairs next to it.  Left it on the ledge, figured someone
would fix it later, and I didn't want to risk getting cursed or
something if I had taken it.

A sudden, annoyingly unanticipated rainfall forced us to seek shelter outside a nearby cafe:

Where we waited until we could get back to the hotel.

Ok, I know, this story is going way too long.  So here, I'll just wrap it up with some pictures:

Becky, at a Starbucks that's slightly different from the one she works at.  Only slightly.

As Jess and Becky said, somehow this is a bit different from watching
street performers at Venice Beach.

We at here for dinner on Friday night.  Pretty sweet.

Welp, that's about it then!  Hope  you enjoyed these tales from Vienna, I'll try to keep the stories a bit shorter next time.

Auf wedersehen!