Day 28

Friday, August 24

5:40am - woke up… urrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

6:20am - checked out. The guy at the desk, who I hadn't met before, was so funny. He was like "I am so sorry for - pardon my language - our fucking awful weather." LOL!!!! There are two ways to get to the hotel from the train station - one is a little bit longer and on a busier street. So I ask the guy if I should go that way (because the other way is ostensibly a "red light district" although maybe it was b/c I just came from Amsterdam or because it's mostly gone, I didn't even see anything except one bar and one shop. LOL.) but the guy goes "pardon my language, but there are too many whores that way. This way is only 50 meters more." OMG, I DIED. This guy is so funny!!! When I was paying, we talked about how US credit cards have no chips and no PINS and I said we were behind all of Europe and he is like "We have had these PINS and cards for like 30 years!!!" Damn US, no need for us to be so behind the times. Anyway, checked out and walked to the train station. It was already light out, so that was nice.

6:45am - hopped on train to the airport - it was busy considering the hour. Made it to the airport in 15 min or less.

7:00amish - made it to the SAS check-in kiosks (which are everywhere). I checked in last night and picked my seat so I just needed to print the boarding card and drop luggage. When the guy took my luggage he was like "ok" and I was like "is that it?" and he was like "yep" - too easy LOL. Followed the signs to security and made it through in about 2 minutes, even though it was quiet they had about 20 different lines/detectors open. LAX could learn a little lesson from this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

7:20am - sitting with my cappuccino - hey I have krones to waste. Ate my pastry from yesterday with my foamy cappuccino and waited for them to put up the gate # for my flight. After drinking and eating, I walked around a bit. CPH airport is so modern and big and bright. You have to walk through the duty-free shop to even get to the gates. How SMART LOL!!!! Had about 45 krones left - a bottle of water, a bottle of (very tasty) strawberry-lime juice, and a pack of gum later, I have 1.75 krones (or oh, about a quarter) left. Nice. Interestingly, the place selling the water was a chocolate shop (irrelevant LOL). It was for 15.95. That's all I bought, so I handed her 16 krones, and didn't get any change. Ok I didn't want the 5 ore, but what's interesting is that the smallest denomination of danish krones is 25 or (or 1/4 of a krone). So if you buy something that is 16.95 or whatever, you won't get the 5 ore, ever. So what do these places do with this 5 ore? Interesting, and a little shady methinks.

8:15isham - gate for the flight finally showed up. Went and sat there and waited. Boarded around 8:45am and wow, this plane is like new. First of all because I checked in last night, I got row 6, which is the first row of economy seats - and the 5 rows of economy "extra" seats are ALL empty. HA! The plane is like brand new, tons of leg room and even enough space to be able to actually open up my computer. OK so this flight was more expensive than a lot of the others, but still it is better than most US flights that are plenty expensive. Flight time is 1h20. Ah, everything in Europe is so close. :)

As an aside observation and/or rant: Something I have noticed now on my 5th flight inside Europe. First of all, even though you don't pick a seat when you book your flight, you get assigned one when you check in. even on the cheapest crappiest low-cost carriers. None of this Southwest airlines free-for-all bullshit. Europe is far too civilized for that kind of crap. Alternatively, you don't board by rows here. In fact, they don't even ANNOUNCE boarding. You just sort of get up and get in line and board. And you know what? It doesn't take any longer to board than in the US with the 5 rows at a time junk. Seriously, they know what they are doing over here.

10:45am - plane arrived pretty much on time uneventfully. Followed the signs to baggage claim etc, and waited for my luggage. Took a while for it to start but once the luggage started coming, mine came pretty fast. Ahhhh lovely, I won't have to fly again until I fly home in almost 3 weeks!! Nice! All 5 flights were uneventful and successful in terms of baggage. After getting my luggage I saw a tourist info window right there at baggage claim so I got in line and got a free map and an 8-day transport card. I know I know I won't be here for 8 days. But the other option was a 3-day card, which isn't long enough. Thing is, everything I read about the transport here is that it's amazing and efficient so I figure I will use it quite a lot to try to save my feet for Italy coming up. Plus it gave me a discount on the S-bahn (aka commuter rail) from the airport, I only had to pay a 1.70 euro supplement. So I bought the card for 27.20 and she showed me how to validate it and I was on my way.

11:35am - Found the train and one was ciming shortly, at 11:39. Was a couple min late and I noticed, NO A/C! omg! Anyway it was ok at least it has windows that open. So about 20 min later I was at the Landstrasse/Wien-Mitte station, which I thought was just a couple min walk from my hotel. Turns out it was almost 10 min walk, which was not enjoyable (and I could have hopped on a tram right to my hotel if I had known) but anyway found it with no problems. The hotel is RIGHT on the major ring, and it is RIGHT in front of a major tram stop. Perfect.

1:00pmish - got to the hotel and my room was ready! They sent one of the maids to come help me, I don't think she spoke english. LOL But she showed me how to open the window (it opens automatically since the rooms are on the top floor and it opens up. My room faces the back, so that's nice, will be quiet (but there is a/c here anyway, one of the main reasons I booked this place and considering it's in the 80s here, thank god I did). So that's cool. The room is very nice, pretty spacious for a single and furnished in a really classic sort of Viennese style. Has a fridge and a bathroom with a nice-looking shower (no feet-soaking :( ). TV gets enough English to keep me busy. Ok but, internet is 1 euro for every 15 minutes or 18 euros a day. WHAT THE CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So I will buy like a half hour or hour a day I guess, just to update the blog and all, but geez. That's crazy. There are internet cafes but they're not right around the corner, and probably not all that much cheaper anyway. No point in bothering. Anyway, that's the only thing about the room I can find to complain about. There's a nice closet with plenty of hangers (good since I need to do laundry later), a mini-bar with a fridge (hooray I can buy stuff at the street market, like um OLIVES!?!? Hahaha). And unlike my last hotel, there is a table beside the bed so I don't have to put my stuff on the FLOOR. Also, enough lighting and the a/c seems to work very well, thank goodness as it is pretty hot here (Especially coming from the coolness that was Brussels, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen!)

1:30pmish - Anyway, I settled in and went back out to find the Opera house, which is at the end of the main pedestrianized area - the nice thing about Vienna is that the vast majority of the sites are really close to each other. First, I saw an ATM right across the street, paid that a visit while I thought of it. It gave me Euros as 100 bills, great. No one will take those. LOL

In the Rick Steves book he mentions a cafeteria type place right by the opera, figured I could find it and grab some lunch. Found the opera - well, it's hard to miss. Found the street right behind it and there was a big sign for this cafeteria. Holy crap, it's on 3 levels and the place was freaking PACKED at 1:30pm. It's a big cafeteria and they had Viennese things like schnitzel and stuff like that, but it was fairly expensive. For the salads and fruit you pay by the plate. So a small plate is the same price if you put one piece of tomato on it or if you stack it up 6 inches high. Anyway I got a medium salad plate and a small fruit bowl and a "pretzel bread" roll and a small soda and a little thing of butter (which they charged about $1 for *rolls eyes*) - total was like 12.55 euros. Ouch - for salad. Anyway it was ok and since I had flown I had that "hungry but feeling weird" thing so it was good. Plus I'm back in the land of the Euro so I figure I can find cheaper dinners.

2:15pmish - find the guided tour office for the opera and find out how to join the 3pm tour. Actually the person talking about it was working with the Mozart orchestra, who has rented out the opera house and was trying to hawk tickets. There were people all around the opera house all dressed up (in the heat!) trying to sell them. My guess is they even got a commission on top of it. Annoyingggggg. So I would take the tour of the opera house. Woohoo! Wasn't planning to do that today, but hey why not. So I sit in the shade til 2:45 when you can buy tickets (6.50 for a combo ticket to the house itself and the museum, which I might go to later I guess, the ticket isn't date-stamped so I don't see why I can't use it on different days lol) and went inside, blahblah. The tour was quite good and the Opera house is indeed absolutely stunning (though I didn't realize most of it was rebuilt after the war - she said it was over 80% damaged and that it had been much much fancier before then :( :( :( :( ). It was supposed to be like 35 minutes but it was more like an hour because she answered questions and because the opera is not in season, we got to go onto the stage and stuff! Anyway it's absolutely stunning inside and the nice thing is that she was like, you can take pictures anywhere! Nice!

4:00pm - hopped on the tram #2 right outside the opera house and followed the "Self-guided Tram tour" in the Rick Steves stuff - yay for stuff to do while sitting down! Took about 40 minutes and it circles the entire ring, where most of the important sights are. Wow, this is a beautiful city. It is a bit newer than many of the others because it got fucked over so badly in WWII, but the stuff is really quite beautiful. It was a nice way to orient myself with the city center for when I want to go back and actually go into a lot of the places. But like, even their stock market is in a gorgeous colored building!!

4:45pm - took the tram all the way around and got off right in front of my hotel. I mean wow, it is literally 4 steps away!!!!!!! Just perfect :) and around the corner there is a stop for 2 other trams that I will probably take. Couldn't be a better location really, quiet enough because it's still a few min away from the really major stuff but literally on the doorstep of it all. Also I noticed in the materials that this is ostensibly a 4-star hotel. A 4-star hotel that charges this much for internet!!!?!?!? Even in Copenhagen it was less than $4 a day! And they didn't even end up charging because they said they are still doing construction so they wouldn't charge for the internet yet!!! Well, whatever. It has a/c and actually that is more important LOL.

5:15pm - took the tram the one stop back to the opera and walked down the main street Kartnerstrasse. Crazy busy with expensive restaurants and all kinds of other places. There is a mall at the opening end of it, the bottom floor of which is a supermarket and gourmet kind of food court. I found some water for 49 cents for a bottle. Yay! I will go back and buy a big bottle tomorrow. I also bought a little jar of pickles for all of 79 cents. I checked the ingredients and didn’t see anything resembling sugar, so I am assuming they'll be OK hahaha.

Kept wandering up until I hit the church St. Stephans. Holy crap, it's monstrous and beautiful. I'll go in it maybe tomorrow or so. Now I was hungry because I had just eaten salad and fruit for lunch lol. So I found one of the places in the Rick Steves book and it actually looked good but it is like a cold buffet (though they had some hot stuff and some good-looking roasted chicken of some kind), but I was just too tired and not in the mood to attempt to deal with spotty english and I certainly don't know any german beyond "danke" so I walked out and I will return when I am less sleep deprived. I had seen an Italian restaurant on the main drag that looked okay (pastas and pizzas that weren't TOO overpriced), so I figured I'd just be lazy and go back there, when I saw peeking above a truck on a side street, the word "Trattoria" - so they had pastas and whatnot that were less than the place on the main drag (duh) and it looked cute despite the fact that there was only one full table so I decided to give it a shot. I got a spritz and some pasta and it was quite good. Wish I remembered the name :( But then the lady (and I say lady because she and the cook were the only people there in this teeny place), picked up her phone and spoke in Italian. So when I asked for the bill I asked where she was from and she told me she and the cook were from Puglia (place in italy). Anyway she was sweet and I felt good about spending my money there. Plus it was tasty and just enough to eat, all for 12 euros including everything. Hooray for being back in euro-land! That meal in Copenhagen probably would've been double LOL

7:30 - already getting dark here. Same time zone as the rest of Europe but further east, guess that's why. Anyway back to the main drag where there are all sorts of street performers (like a human statue female Mozart LOL) and people playing clarinets and violins and banjos and other string instruments I don't recognize at all, so I find the gelato place listed in Rick Steves's book. Only a couple blocks away and quite busy. The options for cups and cones and blahblahblah were endless and I didn't understand it at all, I was like OH GOD! Then I saw this one kind of cone that looked flowery and it said it was 2 euros for 3 something. I was like, a cone with 3 flavors for 2 euros!!?! No surely that was impossible. But NO, it WAS possible. So I asked for it, and oh my, he spoke english hooray HAHAHA. So it wasn't really scoops but more like paddles full, and I got chocolate, coffee, and hazelnut and oh man it was good. And SO CHEAP. I will probably go back there every night. LOL!!

8:00pm - walked back down to the Opera and caught the Tram 2 one stop back to the hotel. I am tired. And I tried wearing my Crocs sandals for the first time tonight. Well the good news is that the bottoms of my feet feel great in them. The bad news is that the straps cut into my feet. So I think I will not be wearing them again :( Or maybe I can put some padding on the problem parts. We'll see. It'd be nice to be able to wear something open and comfy now that I will be in hotter climates from now on. Anyway, got back to the hotel and talked to the guy (different from the guy who checked me in, and much nicer). I asked about the internet and got a code for a half hour which I will use later after doing laundry to update the blog and let people know I'm alive :p Also he kindly changed one of my 100s for me, which I greatly appreciated. Then I was like, I have one more dumb question, "where is breakfast?" LOL Because I had read in the materials in the room that it is from 7-10 which is perfect, but it didn't say where. Anyway it is downstairs from the lobby lol. He was like, didn’t they tell you this when you checked in? And I was like no. And then he gave me a whole sightseeing packet that they hadn't given me either. anyway it sounds like I was really stupid not to pre-book the Schonbrunn palace. So I will pay by wasting time waiting all day and stuff to get in. But it is a can't-miss thing, so I will just suck it up and do it. I have plenty of time here anyway as I have no daytrips planned and there are gardens around the palace so I think I will go super early one morning (it opens at 8:30am, apparently before the tour buses arrive at like 9:30) and I will do it.

OK Ski jumping on ASTROTURF is on eurosport again. What the CRAP.

8:45pm - yay. Laundry time again :'(