Hello Big City

So we just got back from our Salzburg and Munich trip which was amazing! I'm behind though so I'm going to talk about our Vienna trip which was a week ago now.

7:30 on Saturday morning - everyone is pretty tired on the bus except for the kids. Most of the professors who teach in Austria have big families and the kids usually tag along on the bus rides, adding a little spunk to the lives of a bunch of college students :) 10:15 we had mass at Kapuzinerkloster, and at the end of mass we began our walking tour. One of the places we visited on the tour was the Spanish Riding School of Vienna. The horses are Lipizzan horses that perform in front of huge audiences in Vienna. We were told these horses can “dance”. Whatever “dancing” for them is, I guess they are pretty amazing. The first picture are the horses and the second is a sign that tells us when their morning exercise is. I was so entertained! :P

We also visited St. Peter's Church - potentially the oldeset church in Vienna. There are 714 angels in the church and everything that looks like it's made of gold is actually made of wood, but covered in gold :O

We ate at Melker Stiftskeller for lunch. As usual, lunch and the first round of drinks are paid by the University but any other costs are our own. At this point it was about 2:30 and from that time until 8:00 we had free time! We visited St. Stephen’s Church – the heart of Vienna – which was absolutely amazing. It’s a Gothic style church and so far is my favorite that we’ve seen.

I wish I had some better pictures, but it's so difficult to capture how amazing these European churches are! After seeing the church, we took a trip up the “lift” as they call them, and to a platform on TOP of the church. Here's just one picture of the outrageous view. I was scared out of my mind… I can deal with some heights, but this one was difficult. We were SO high up!

Afterward we went to Demel – Vienna’s best known pastry and coffee shop – and had Venetian coffee. I had what was called a Großer Brauner (a large espresso with cream) here’s a picture of it. It definitely made my day :)

We walked around a bit before getting dinner at around 6:30. It was kind of a crazy evening because we ended up with nine people in our group which was stress like no other. We managed to find a pizza place and split four pizzas – which took much longer than it should have. The waitress took forever to get us our check and in a hurry, we paid and left. We got to our meeting place for the bus at a reasonable time, but the stress was enough that I’ve vowed not to go on a trip again with more than four people. We still had fun though :)