St Stephen’s Church – Mozart got married here

Mozart’s house

View from Mozart’s game room

Strauss

Beethoven

Fountain…we’re coming!!

Mozart

Ol blue eyes

Sat 18 – Sun 19 Jul 2015

On Saturday we got up with some reluctance given the previous night’s escapades. We didn’t have to check out until noon – such luxury – so we took our time getting on the road. We drove to Vienna and hung out at the hostel, made noodles for dinner, did laundry and Natalie finally got the Skype date with her sister after 3 months of trying to arrange a good time to catch up!

For 40 euros a night in the outskirts of Vienna you get a top or bottom bunk in a room of 8 with an en-suite. Prague was definitely a good deal and Vienna was expensive! We woke up early on Sunday to try and make a 10:30am walking tour in the city center. We were running a bit late and then Natalie realised she forgot the camera so we had to go back to the hostel. After officially missing the walking tour we headed to the tourist information centre to see if we could find out about concerts and free things to do. The information guy said that there were no free walking tours of Vienna but Natalie had found a website that said there were. So we headed off to the meeting place for a 1pm tour. Well I guess that website was wrong! There was no tour so we started off doing our own self-guided tour. It was a balmy 38 degrees by the time we headed off.

Our first stop was Mozart’s house. We poked our head in to see and noticed that the staff were not watching so we snuck in and saved 20+euros. Turns out that when you buy a ticket you get an audio guide – we were the only two visitors without one so we looked suspicious and were asked to show our tickets. Natalie played the innocent and said we lost them and we got away with it. The house was fascinating though! Then we went to a free classical music concert at the Haus der Musik. A violinist and a pianist played Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss and Kreisler (20th Century Austrian violinist and composer). After that we continued on our exploration – saw a few famous buildings and then spotted a huge fountain that was giving off some spray. We sat at the edge with our feet in it for quite a while. We continued walking to the Museumplatz for dinner. We finished the tour (for the most part) and then went to the Rathausplatz for the showing of the 1982 Frank Sinatra America Tour as part of the Vienna film festival. What a wonderful day and night in Vienna! The only unfortunate thing was that we didn’t get to learn a lot about the city’s history or significance of the architecture but we certainly saw and did a lot of amazing things for very little money.