We returned to Vienna on Monday morning and met Markus' mom for lunch at the Belvedere. It is another palace with a beautiful garden. The palaces are now art galleries which we did not check out but certainly the gardens were lovely and will be even more stunning when they are finished. Apparently the gardens in Vienna all have a theme/colour scheme each year. We found a couple of rogue flowers though.
Afterwards, we went shopping and just had to try on lederhosen and dirndl's for the photo op.
Tuesday, we visited Stadt Park, the largest municipal park in Vienna. It was amazing to me how many people were in the park on a Tuesday morning - classes of young kids playing on the playground equipment, older kids having a phys ed lesson, people walking their dogs, old men reading newspapers on the benches that lined all the pathways.
The Kursalon, which hosts dinner dance music shows was next door so Robert and I had a waltz before entering the park.
Johann Strauss
Mozart
Before leaving the park, we stopped at a cafe for a drink. I tried Tanya's coffee as it felt wrong to leave Vienna without trying some of it's famous coffee but I still don't enjoy coffee. I much preferred my Hugo (white wine, elderflower syrup, soda water, lime and mint leaves, if I'm not mistaken) and the fresh and warm apricot cake the waiter talked us into was divine.
After a final lunch in the park of the Palmenhaus while eating one last Bitzringer sausage, we headed to Danube Island park for a stroll.
Later, we took the tram through the sights of the Ringstraß before heading to Hundertwasser House, an apartment building and small village designed by famous Austrian painter and architect Freidensreich Hundertwasser. He believed that curved lines and colours provided happiness to the soul and was a huge proponent of reusing and recycling, using old and new within his designs. He also designed this with the idea of humans and nature living together in harmony .
Since we had now seen absolutely everything on the must-see lists of Vienna, we decided to head home. Markus' dad came over for a quick visit to bring us copies of photos he had taken of us at the festival we attended our first night in Austria . Then Markus and Tanya took us out for a nice dinner at a very typically Austrian restaurant before we played a final game of Poker Dice (sort of like Yahtzee but witb poker hands) and headed to bed as we had a taxi coming at 430 am to bring us to the airport and back to reality.
Other than only having 5 minutes between our flight from Vienna landing and our flight out of Brussels boarding, at a very different location about a 15 minutes walk away from each other with passport control and a huge duty free shop in between, to arrive at the gate to learn we also needed new boarding passes and to answer security questions, our first flight was fairly uneventful. I did have a final Viennese encounter with a woman at security before leaving Vienna though . I guess she wanted to make sure I remembered that the people in Vienna are not like the Von Trapp family. Then on our Brussels to Newark flight, the wife of the man in front of Robert basically asked him to cut off his legs so that her husband could recline his seat further. "We all have the same space " says the woman who wouldn't even be 5 feet tall and her husband who was all of 5'5" maybe. It took a long time to explain to her that Robert can't do anything about his knees blocking the recline of her husband's seat. And my in-seat entertainment system crashed midway through a movie and they couldn't fix it. Once we arrived in Newark, Robert had to go through secondary passport control as he was a name match. When we began boarding the Newark to Chicago flight, they were requesting that people check their roller bag carryons through to their final destination as the flight was full. Robert volunteered to do so even though we were in an early boarding group and wouldn't have had problems ourselves. Guess what?! We arrived in Traverse City with all the bags except that one. And that one was the one we needed for the night. It was still in Chicago. Luckily we ended up booking a cheap room when the airline added the extra connection in Newark to our itinerary so hopefully the bag arrives on the 10 am flight as promised.....Then we head home...home sweet home...
Glorious spring!!!
ReplyDelete