Big Adventures, Little World

We started the day with a walking tour through the city of Vienna visiting the palaces and other monuments and museums. Most things are all within a short walk of each other, all around what’s called the ring road, which is just a big circle and has all the famous places around it. Once we had finished the walking tour we had the rest of the day to explore the city for ourselves.

A group of us wandered the main street with a couple of the girls wanting to shop and it was a good place for it. We had a nice relaxing walk, got some ice cream before we found a place to have lunch so we could get some schnitzel. I had a wiener schnitzel, as they called it, topped with ham, cheese and a white wine sauce and it was delicious. Closest thing I could find to a chicken parmi! After lunch it was time to head back and meet up with the rest of the tour for our visit to a local Schnapps museum/factory.

The Schnapps Museum was really interesting and we had a short tour and some explanations of how the schnapps was made and the different types they made there. The owner gave us the tour and was quite funny and gave us a lot of information about it, like that it had been in his family for generations making the schnapps and that it is all still original including the cash register which is nearly 100 years old and has never failed or needed to be repaired. After the tour we had the opportunity to sample some of the schnapps and also buy some if we wanted. I tried a few different shots, including the absinthe, which was very strong, but still quite nice and not too much of a burning sensation either. Then I tried what they call Rocket Fuel, a 56% alcohol drink, but surprisingly doesn’t taste that strong at all. They recommend that if you have a cough to have a shot of it before anything else and it will get rid of the cough. I also tried the Schonbrunner Gold, which is an orange flavoured drink, about 40% alcohol and has little gold flakes in the bottle. They were all really nice and went down a lot easier than their alcohol content would suggest.

After the schnapps there was a group going to a traditional Viennese Chamber Orchestra performance and the rest of us were going to Prater Park, an amusement park with one of the largest and oldest Ferris wheels in the world. We mostly just sat around and had some food, and a few of us went off and on a couple of the rides. Bel, Rainbow (our bus driver), Ando, Tommy & I headed off to go on a chair swing ride, when it spins around and the chairs fly off to the sides. Not scary at all, the face it is 117 metres in the air could make it seem a bit scarier I suppose. This is exactly what happened to Tom, as once he saw the tower he was having no part in it at all, being that he is afraid of heights. So the rest went up there and it was definitely worth it. The views were amazing. The lights were all starting to come on through the city and through the park on all the other rides as well. It looked really spectacular and I even took my camera up with me and took some photos while spinning around. There wasn’t much else to do, so we sat around a bit longer and chatted before going to pick up the rest of the group from their performance and then back to the campsite for the night.