Greetings from Vienna!

After a short drive in from Salzburg, we spent a day exploring Vienna.

As you may have noticed by now, we like restaurants! Since Vienna is known for its cafes, we picked out a few local favorites to try. For lunch, I had an excellent pancake with plum sauce as my entree that is a local Austrian specialty. Only after the waiter acted like I was strange did we realize it is typically served as a dessert! Whoops! It was about the same sweetness as any pancake with fruit topping in the US so I think that I must really like things sweet! For our actual dessert, we enjoyed a raspberry torte which was great!

Nearby the cafe, we went through the Schonbrunn Gardens, which is a huge park area and palace. The grounds revere beautiful, and it looked like locals loved to walk, run, and relax there.

We then headed into the heart of downtown via subway. Having used subways and trains in multiple international cities, I can say that Vienna has to be one of the most visitor friendly systems around! We’ll tell you more about this in a separate post, but this was an instance where having a chip credit card with a PIN number (takes a lot and lot of work to get this in the US!) was critical for buying a ticket. For those traveling internationally, look for an upcoming blog posts on some tips/tricks that we’re putting together.

Once downtown, we first headed for the Musical Instruments Museum (Kunsthistorisches Museum: Collection of Historic Musical Instruments). I was able to see several trumpet collections such as some of the original herald and keyed trumpets.

I didn’t know that my Dad’s metronome had made it into the museum!

Kellogg Friends – Remember the Steinway case?

We finished off the day by hitting a local market (more fresh peaches :)), walking through the Imperical Palace, and then hitting up two local cafes. We particularly enjoyed Cafe Sperl, the oldest cafe in Vienna. For dessert, we enjoyed a plum tart and mocha expressos at Cafe Aida, another local spot.

We have noticed that Austrians seem to love to stop for a pastry and cafes. We see many more people just getting this versus having a full meal at a restaurant. Sometimes in the US restaurants are annoyed when you just get coffee and dessert so it’s been really interesting to see!