Wait... where are we going?

Public transportation in Vienna is awesome. I suppose that might not mean very much as somebody currently living in  LA where public transportation is abysmal, but really... train stations are rarely more than a 10 minute walk from whereever you are and the trains run every 5-10 minutes, buses run regularly in the areas the trains don't go, and there are bike lanes on every street, and pedestrian only zones throughout the city center. We also got a week-long pass that lets us ride as much as we want, which is super convenient since we have to take the train into the city proper, and that had us feeling like transportation pros.

   We're also tourist pros, since I discovered on our first Europe visit that most cities have a pass that grants admission to most of the major tourist sites and a lot of littler attractions, too. Vienna is no exception, so we've been making great use of our passes (and since the money is spent up front, we get over our natural inclination to not pay entrance fees). The Vienna Pass also includes unlimited rides on the very touristy but very useful Hop On Hop Off buses, which take tourists around to most of the major sites and have recorded information guides about what you're driving past. So they are both informative and useful for getting around!

Riding the tourist bus like the tourists we are. But the recordings about what we're driving past are pretty helpful.

 On Tuesday morning we went to the Belveder Palace, originally built as a summer home for some Hapsburg prince and then later the primary residence to a number of Archdukes and other fancy people. It was also one of the first public art museums, commissioned by Empress Maria-Theresea, and that has continued to today. It is a great example of Baroque statelyness with an awful lot of gold thrown in. After wandering around the museums and the very pretty grounds, we set out to see more sights.

Someday I will have a cottage garden like this one. Except probably smaller.

The view towards the center city

Hello fancy ceiling. Most of the detail is illusionist painting.A celebration for the wedding of Marie-Antoinette and King Louis was apparently held in this room. Seemed fitting.

Napoleon continues to get the admiration he craved. But seriously, it's a cool painting in person.

Ah yes, what a quaint summer house.

Unfortunately, I'm not very good at reading guidebooks, apparently, and both of the two things I wanted to do - visit an old insane asylum on the outskirts of the city and a winery tour - were closed on Tuesdays. We'll prehaps try to reattempt that later in the week. Fortunately we only made it partway to either of those places before Michael double checked the opening times. We did hit up the Sigmund Freud Museum, which is actually at the sight of original home and office. It was a neat experince, although they are also in the process of restoring more of the rooms and renovating, so clearly visiting in a few years would probable be the right choice. They did have a recreation of his reading chair, which was apparently custom designed and very odd looking because his favorite reading pose was to hook his leg up over the arms and lean back with the book over his face, and some designer friend of his tried to make a seat that would better support his head in his position.

Pretty church with pretty windows!

Hallo, Wien. We took the tourist bus up to a vista above the city, which had a few pretty walks through some forest and obviously nice views. The city center is on the right, the island we're staying on is on the left, and vineyards are in the foreground.

After the Freud Museum, our misadventures really began. As I said, I thought that we'd get out of the city and see some of the surrounding countryside and visit a winery a little ways out of the city, only to realize it was closed. So we tried to change course and go visit a very old Monastery instead, which was even further out of town. No big deal, public transportation is awesome here. So we take a different bus down from the overlook (wait, are we on the right bus? Is this going to the right place? yes, ok) to catch a train that heads north. Except the train tracks are down for maintenance, so we have to take a replacement bus instead. Ok... except that we're pretty sure that the nice lady at the ticket counter told us the wrong bus number, because we got on a bus (number S45, which is what she said) and it was definitely going the wrong way. It took us a while to figure it out, since maybe the route was just a little funny? Did we get on going the wrong direction? What is going on exactly? In the end, that bus just took us to another Viennese train station, and since I was getting grumpy and we were both hot and tired, we gave up and came back to the hotel, where we both promptly and unintentionally took a two hour nap. So in the end it was actually not that bad. ;)

We did venture out again in the evening to get food (we stopped at a delicious shawarma place) and check out a ballroom dance studio that was having an open dance. That was quite fun. It wasn't like usual studios we go to - it was more like a ballroom dance-club scene with a bunch of lounge seating and a bar. There were maybe 8 couples, so it was pretty quiet, but they played a nice variety of music and I was able to rent some dance shoes, so we had a lovely time! And now we can say we've done the Viennese Waltz in Vienna, so that bucket-list item is complete.