That time we went to... Vienna, Austria

13 Jan 2019

This is a new mini-series in the Blog, an attempt to write posts that I should have written at the time but failed to do so. Enjoy!

September 2015 Victoria and I went on a long weekend to Vienna, Austria. It was a bit of a treat, we spoilt ourselves to Business class flights and a fancy room in the Hilton on the banks of the Danube. We had a fantastic time although there were a few hiccups along the way…

The first hiccup was taking the airport train in the wrong direction, which meant we spent some time at the very quaint Maria Ellend station, not ideal but we were back on our way reasonably quickly. The second hiccup was on the way back to the airport, where we were fined several hundred euros for not having the correct ticket, absolutely not the highlight of the trip. Note to travellers, the Vienna all city pass does not include the city’s airport.

Aside from that, the trip was fantastic! On our first night we spent time walking along the banks of the River Danube and enjoyed watching the boats slowly pass by from our hotel room. We visited the Hard Rock Cafe (#culturalhighlight) and afterwards stopped by at the Ritz Carlton Hotel for drinks - which was very lovely indeed.

The following day we managed to see Pandas for the first time at Tiergarten Schönbrunn (Vienna Zoo), which is famous for being the oldest continually operating zoo in the world. We even found Panda haribos imported from China in the gift shop! The best memory from the Zoo was the ‘Scumbag Tapir’ which walked into it’s enclosure and into a beautiful clean pool of water and proceeded to violently defecate, no shits were given.

Sunday was spent enjoying the city; we walked around the Heldenplatz, famous for Hitler’s 1938 speech following the annexation of Austria. We saw the beautiful Burgtheater and had a spot of lunch in the wonderful Zum Schwarzen Kameel restaurant, which founded in 1618 was pretty darn old (it was also in a film of which I can’t recall).

Wrapping up the day we had some of Vienna’s famous coffee and of course, Sachertorte; this was really rather lovely and we enjoyed it at the original Hotel Sacher for added authenticity. 10/10 would go back.