Vienna – Grey Patterson

Donau

It’s been, like, three whole days since my last post. This probably seems like a long stretch to people who’ve gotten used to my post a day thing, but I can’t exactly keep that pace up now that I’m back in the Real World.¹ If I were to hazard a guess, one a week is going to be more realistic an expectation to have.²
Administrative stuff out of the way, though, because it’s time to see some of Vienna. It’s a pretty city, folks! I saw a really cool library the other day, but no pictures for you because I didn’t plan on going there and thus didn’t bring my camera.³
Okay, I’m done teasing you. Today, Anna and I headed out towards the end of the U1⁴ to explore the parks around the Danube.⁵
It actually took us a while to get started – we were planning to meet at the Donau Zentrum which we were assuming was a park – “Danube Center,” right? But no, it was actually a sprawling mall complex like half a mile from the river. Whoops. Next time we’re meeting at the metro station.
But once we got to the river, hoo boy, was it pretty.

Arrival

After a rather grueling amount of flying, we’re here in Austria! I’m taking advantage of my body’s confused circadian rhythm to write this at a nice 6:30 in the morning, having already been up for almost an hour.

We landed at about 8:30 in the morning what feels like a couple of weeks ago, but looking at my calendar¹ was actually only a couple days ago. From the airport, we went by the hotel we’d be staying at to drop off our bags – the rooms wouldn’t be ready until later in the day – and then took Vienna’s impressive public transit system to the Austro-American Institute of Education for our initial orientation. Getting there was fun – it’s just a couple of trams away, but because Vienna is Vienna, there’s a lot of stuff to see on the way.²

After the orientation, we wandered around a market for a bit to get lunch³ and then made our way back to the hotel.⁴ I took a bit of an unplanned nap, and then we were off to dinner at an Italian restaurant a short walk away.⁵

The next morning we were up, bright and early, and off into a longer trek through Vienna’s public transit system. It’s an impressive system, with a lot of well-developed infrastructure.⁶ And then we were on the train to Dorfgastein, where I finally got my camera out and started taking pictures, because good lord, look at this.