Meag: We took off this morning not really sure what we were going to do. Savanna chose a train station by a church she wanted to see and said “Let’s go here!” The station comes up in the middle of this large square in front of St. Stephens Cathedral and is surrounded by lots of shops. We walked around for a while, avoiding the people dressed in period costume and looking for reasonably priced coffee. We finally sat down for coffee and boy was it good. From here we walked over to the Hofburg Palace.

Sav: Can I just please note that Meaghan didn’t even know what St. Stephens Cathedral was?! Even after we saw it! She originally wrote that sentence as ‘——– church’ hoping I would fill in the blank when it was my turn to write. Stephensplatz in front the St. Stephens is like the main square in downtown Vienna! Anyway it was beautiful to see, I am excited to go back and tour the inside.

The Hofburg palace was really neat, I didn’t know what to expect but we walked around the grounds for awhile and it just became more and more grandiose and extravagant. There were horses everywhere and beautifully intricate statues. Our first stop was the Silver Collection, which literally turned out to be thousands of plates and silverware pieces and table decorations from the palace. I couldn’t believe we had 30 odd stations on our audio guide about the plates and napkins from the palace. It was gorgeous and there was so much detail don’t get me wrong but I just had a moment at the end of that tour where I thought ‘I just looked at old spoons for an hour.’

M: Savanna had a moment at the very beginning of the tour too. She looked at me, mildly horrified, after listening to the introduction about how long the silver tour would be and said “Do NOT listen to everything. We will be here FOREVER.” She seems to have caught on that I take a long time with these things and she did not want to spend our entire day looking at spoons. Good thing I didn’t want to either, otherwise we would have had a problem.

We also visited the Sisi Museum about Empress Elisabeth, and the Imperial Apartments. We went through her drawing room and learned that she used to spend about three hours getting her hair done, while someone read aloud to her and she looked out the window. Savanna and I disagree on whether this sounds awesomely relaxing or insanely boring.

S: You just take a guess at which one of us thought what.

M: And it turns out there is a natural history museum in Vienna…so guess where we went next!

S: She was so thrilled! Just kidding. That was me. But Meaghan did her best friend duty and walked around with me for a couple hours while I freaked out about taxidermy and ‘look at that scarab!’ Or ‘oh my gosh this sea cow!’ It was marvellous! We only explored the one floor but I was just totally enthralled the entire time. Every new case and every new room was wonderful. I think Meaghan had the same moment I had earlier thinking ‘please for the love of god do not stop at every single one.’

M: There were four rooms of birds…it was a lot. Although I am learning from all of our natural history museum trips! I remembered what a coelacanth is, and even how to spell it for this post.

S: Next we walked around the old town a bit and found some food. It seemed like it was going to be decent but turns out we basically just found tasteless Austrian Swiss Chalet… It was super weird. But we decided after the unsatisfactory dinner that it would be the perfect time to get the original Sacher Torte in town, something recommended to us by a friend back home. It was exactly what we needed, and completely worth every penny. Seriously waiting in line at 8 pm on a Saturday night for cake? Normally not the funnest thing ever. But this cake deserved it and totally lived up to our expectations.

M: Paired with an espresso, it was delicious. Worth the wait.

S: As a funny sidebar we also walked around all day laughing at the fact that since W’s are pronounced as V’s, ‘Vienna’ is spelled everywhere here as ‘Wien’ and a person from Vienna is ‘Wiener.’ We also laughed about the fact that we are laughing about this at the age of 23, and that brought us endless entertainment. We will probably laugh about this the entire time we’re here.

S&M