Our adventure has begun! We did not intend for this to be our first stop, but since we used points for the flights to get to Europe, we took what was available. In the end, this was a good place for ‘easing into’ our adventure of travelling for seven months.
Vienna is a beautiful city, easily walkable and easy enough to get around. The metro system is quite extensive and English is spoken by pretty much everyone here so communication is not an issue. Getting into the city center from the airport thankfully was a dream as we simply walked off the plane with all our belongings and headed for the train to downtown. From there the metro was easy to follow and we were checked into our hotel by 9:30am. Tired but we were happy.
Vienna is extremely clean and extremely orderly (no one jaywalks, all cars wait patiently for pedestrians to cross the street and everyone waits for the cross-walk lights before crossing the street- everyone). Our impression is that Vienna feels like a very large small town; everything closes very early and the city feels like a ghost town after 6pm. Even the tourist center follows this schedule. A ‘late night’ (i.e.- 9pm) snack run tuned into an hour and a half marathon where we finally gave up on finding an open store and settled for fries and beer at the night market.
Another thing that makes Vienna feel like a small town was that practically everything closes on Sunday. We tried to go to a park and even that was closed! A little odd to walk around the downtown and surrounding area with many other tourists all looking at the closed shops and such. Still, Vienna has its charms. The twisty streets of lovely buildings are easy to get lost in, the river and canal are used very well with lovely paths and buildings lining the water, and there are many beautiful parks in the city.