During Candice and I’s 6 days in Bratislava we used one for a day trip to nearby Vienna in Austria. When we left Munich at the end of September we were planning on spending more time in Austria but we quickly realized the country was out of our price range.
We looked first for some accommodations in Innsbruck in the heart of the Austrian Alps but there was nothing available under $120 a night. We looked at Salzburg and Vienna as well but they were also too expensive so we decided to leave a proper Austrian visit for another vacation when we have a larger budget.
Travelling from Munich to Bratislava you pass through Northern Austria
and going alongside the Alps for a majority of the drive it was hard to not be impressed by them. At least we’ve got something to look forward to coming back and seeing again.
From Bratislava there are plenty of bus options. The company we went with ran a bus to Vienna every hour and a bus from Vienna to Bratislava every hour as well. They started early and ran late into the evening and there was no need to buy ahead of time. I believe the tickets were just 5€ each way and you could buy them from the driver.
As the map shows below it was a quick 1 hour drive end to end.
We unfortunately didn’t pick the best day to visit Vienna as it rained the entire day. We were spared about an hour when we first arrived in the morning and then the rain was on and off (mostly on) for the rest of the day.
Because of this we didn’t get near as many photos as we would have liked. Maybe that is for the best though because the city was really impressive and I could have easily taken a 1000 photos.
I’ll start off with the reason for the title. Vienna has an impressive amount of old palaces, and not those meager 200 room ones, I’m talking about absolutely enormous palaces covering 4 entire city blocks. We had to walk around one of the palaces and it took 15 minutes to go around 2 sides of this thing and in that time we passed another 3 or 4 palaces almost as big.
What do you do when you’re a city with this many massive buildings? You can’t just tear them down as that would be blasphemy. The idea seems to have been to turn them into museums and some of the buildings hold 3, 4 or more museums inside. This should go without saying that if you’re a fan of museums you’ll love Vienna.
Normally we don’t do museums but since it was raining we found time to visit 2. The first one sounded interesting, a globe museum, and the 2nd one was free included as part of a 3 in 1 museum ticket.
The globe museum was exactly as it sounds like, an entire museum dedicated to globes. The first section showed some of the first globes ever made by Europeans back when Australia hadn’t been discovered and only the Eastern part of North America was known.
I thought it was fascinating to see how globes were drawn in the 1500s or earlier and how they’ve changed through the centuries.
There were even some cool devices that showed how the phases of the moon or eclipses work using a candle to represent the sun.
Here’s a representation of Saturn with its rings and known moons.
There were a few very large globes with diameters of 1 and 2 meters. Because of the high cost to produce something like this 200-300 years ago only the extremely wealthy like kings owned them.
Look how happy Candice is to be next to a giant globe.
Now this shouldn’t have surprised me but at the end of the museum they had globes of other celestial bodies. I don’t know why I never considered people would make globes of the Moon and Mars but now I want one for my house!
So I hope a tour of a museum wasn’t too boring for you. It wasn’t too large and we only spent a little over an hour inside just perfect for us.
The 2nd museum we entered was on the ancient history of papyrus paper used in Ancient Egypt. It was fascinating to think about people 3000 years ago getting a paper receipt for buying a bag of oranges, shows how little some things change, but it didn’t make for good photos and I won’t spend more time on it here.
In between the rain spurts I was able to get a good amount of photos of something we found all over Vienna. Yup, overly impressive statues!
Vienna had some of the most dramatic statues I’ve ever seen like this guy wrestling a bull
this guy wrestling a lion
this guy wrestling another guy
and blatant murder in the streets. I mean what is this statue supposed to represent? I mean somewhere in the Bible it must say “Thou shalt not club your neighbour!”
There were other more normal statues but still just as elaborately carved.
And this one has so much going on it with it. There’s a serpent trying to bite an eagle that is screeching at a dude falling off a cliff while a naked guy holding a sword standing on top of everyone.
I’ll leave you with a picture of our delicious lunch. Fried dumplings with a cream sauce drizzled over them – some filling options were savory and others were sweet. These were really, really good and not too expensive for Vienna.
We only got a small taste of Vienna and I would have loved to stay a few more days to fully explore the city and the food but be prepared for the same prices as any place in Western Europe. Spending our time in Bratislava where prices were half was definitely the better choice for us this time around.
A Romping European Time 