June 1, 2012

That train was terrible.  There were six of us in an extremely small cabin.  There were three bunks on each side that were maybe two feet wide, not very big for a guy my size.  On top of the sardine style cabin, there was no air condition for the first six hours of the ride, so we were sweating pretty profusely.  We finally made it to Vienna, ten hours later.  We came to the hotel and dropped our luggage off in some rooms.  We are staying in the Courtyard Marriott here in Vienna, and it is by far the nicest hotel we have stayed in, it’s great.  It gets better, we have an odd number of guys and apparently there are only single and double rooms here and I got a room to myself.  I have a king bed and plenty of space.  It will be good to have this room for a couple of days.  We met back up and walked down through the Schonbrunn gardens to the Schonbrunn palace, it is the palace where all of Austria’s kings have lived.  We walked up an enormous hill to a monument that overlooked the entire city of Vienna.  We were released for the day at this point and told to meet back up at 7.00 tonight.  Sumner, Morgan, and I went looking for food and found the best deal I’ve seen so far.  We paid five euros for fries, drink, and schnitzel burger.  I didn’t know what schnitzel was but figured I would try it.  I still didn’t know what it was while eating it; apparently it is just thin strips of chicken fried in batter.  It was very good.  We had the afternoon off and we met up at 7.00 PM in the hotel lobby.  We went to downtown Vienna and walked the main street there, which is now a pedestrian walkway only.  We saw many street performers; the coolest ones were the break dancers and the saxophone quartet. We finished walking down the street and were released for the night when we had seen most of downtown.  Anoop suggested that we try a restaurant called Weinerwald, Wiener World, and a few people got some chuckles out of that.  It was a local Austria style restaurant that had all kinds of schnitzel.  I was all schnitzeled out from lunch so I ended up getting chicken wings; I know that’s getting real crazy.  We found an Australian pub and went there thinking that the people there would speak English.  There were English speaking people there, but they weren’t Australian.  Some were Irish, South African, and a few Australians.  We had a beer or two and I went home, that train ride had me exhausted.  That’s it for today.

T