We got a late start after having another nice breakfast and doing some planning using the WiFi we had in our room (a luxury we don’t usually have). We booked our next hostel in Ljubljana, Slovenia and began to plan our travels in Croatia. After we felt sufficiently secure with our next week of travel we headed out to the Schönbrunn palace. The gardens behind the palace were extensive and pretty neat.
The trees were well manicured and shaped to form a sort of tunnel around the path.
There were hedges that formed a maze like path. After sufficient exploration we took the underground to the city center. We went to Stephansplatz and saw the Stephensdom cathedral which was one of the more impressive cathedrals that we’ve seen on the trip. In general there are a lot of beautiful buildings in Wein (the actual name of Vienna). Speaking of Wien, the drinking fountains there all said “Wiener Wasser” (Vienna water) on them which could make a good tongue twister.
We walked by the state opera house and karlsplatz park. Karlskirche (St. Charles church) was beautiful. Unfortunately we didn’t go inside because it was almost closed.
In Schwartzenbergplatz we encountered an interesting sound sculpture.
Next, we walked to the Belvedere gardens complex. The gardens had very interesting sculpted trees (conical, spiral, circular) which Jon used to make tree people… 🙂
There were also interesting female sphinx sculptures.
There were two baroque palaces (simply the summer home of prince Eugene) which were quite nice. The main picture of the post is the Upper Belvedere Palace.
We returned to our hostel, ready for another dinner at the nearby Mariahilferbräu. This time we had potato pancakes and salad topped with fried mozzarella and pumpkin seed oil (turned out to just be standard deep fried mozzarella sticks on top of salad but the pumpkin seed oil was great!) The pumpkin seed oil is a specialty of the region which we fell in love with. We finished the meal with a digestif of fruit brandy. We returned to the hostel for one final evening in the lounge socializing. It was the most social hostel we had been in so far.