And let them eat cake

We arrived in Vienna midday on Friday. Elizabeth and I were planning to get off at Westbanhof station, which was a 4 minute walk to our hostel, but after our train went through the central train station and the next station was not Westbanhof like we had thought, we quickly asked a local.

Elizabeth: "do you speak English?"
local: "ehhh"
Elizabeth: "we are supposed to get off at Westbanhof, is that the next stop or should we get off here?"
Local: turns to friend and repeats in German, turns back and says hurriedly "get off here!"

We practically jumped off the train and found ourselves outside the train station. We watched as a group of American tourists got into a taxi (must be nice!) and then realized our "4 turn" hostel directions from Westbanhof would not be so useful. Luckily Elizabeth's mother had been on a cruise through Eastern Europe 6 months before and she had collected some maps and information packets for us. I had previously been looking at said map on the train and given up "this is just too detailed, I hope our hostel has a touristy map!" Well, little did we know, our overly descriptive map came in handy many times, because turns out we were staying about an hour's walk west of the center of town. I directed us to our hostel, and what felt like 5 miles (and turned out to be 1.5 miles) later, we finally huffed and puffed our way into Hotel Rutheinsteiner. Thank you Mrs. Byrne!

After freshening up, we headed out to the center of Vienna. We had discovered that Rick Steve's has some great audio tours that we downloaded on our iPhones and so we had a very lovely tour of central Vienna. It was beginning to lightly rain and it was chilly and dark outside, and the whole thing was just so magical. We love Vienna! Prague, however, we now prefer to hate on. We like to remind ourselves of "that time we spent 3 days in a city where no one smiles." We can make the best of anything with a smile on our face, but hindsight is 20/20.

We took a little break in our audio tour to have a delicious Hotel Sachar famous chocolate tort. Lots of reviews had hyped this little guy up and even mentioned the tort being "too dry", but lets just say I was licking my plate by the end! The audio tour was just fabulous and afterwards we had one of our best dinners yet at a local biesel (cross between pub and French restaurant.) We had a goulash and a tafelspitz (boiled beef and vegetables.) For one girl that doesn't eat much meat and one who literally hasn't since 2009, we've been enjoying ourselves some animals.

We decided to splurge and take the 2€ underground (metro) home and skipped out on the 45 minute walk home.

1. Hotel sachar's "Sachar Torte" 2. The Hofburg palace at night 3. Our delicious dinner!