Highs and Lows of Vienna so Far

Let me just get this out of the way first and foremost without letting it spoil through the rest of the post: I broke my camera. I dropped it on the floor of a Viennese bakery this morning before getting a giant cinnamon roll and didn't realize until I tried to take a photo of men rappelling down the interior of St. Stephen's Cathedral putting multicolored saran wrap over the stain glass windows. My last photograph is a picture of a huge circular loaf of bread that my friend and I bought because we thought it was a pretzel, and it looked like one, but it was actually a sweet roll. We then ate the entire thing in the bakery and probably jumped right out as clueless foreigners (if the hesitant ordering wasn't already a dead giveaway), but it was delicious and will be forever remembered as the last photo in my hardworking camera that's gotten me around the world for so very long. I'm currently struggling with figuring out how to get a new one- and record the rest of my last 5 weeks abroad! If anyone has any advice/wants to speed mail me one that would be lovely. I need it by next Monday when I go to Scotland.

But if that was the supreme low of my day and week and maybe month, I've been having a wonderful time here in Austria otherwise. The food I've mentioned above is breakfast mostly, Alexa and I will pop into different bakeries for a pastry, and then we've also been eating well otherwise. For lunch I've had a classic sausage, cut up into bite size pieces with ketchup and a roll on the side (I'm trying really hard to figure out how to order a hot dog, it's my goal for the week), and a wonderful croissant sandwich today. Ice cream is also a huge thing here, and it's mostly gelaterias set up by Italians. The first day I had a simple one scoop cone that was delicious, but today we split 'spaghetti ice'- which is thin strands of ice cream made to look like pasta, with a strawberry sauce drizzled over it and then topped with coconut. So it basically looked like a spaghetti dinner! I might steal some of her photos to post here too.

All of the buildings in the first district of Vienna, where we've been spending most of our time have been gorgeous and old, relics of the Hapsburg empire. Today, we toured the iconic St. Stephen's cathedral which is gigantic and ornate. We went through the crypts, which were like something out of a Dan Brown book- rooms full of bones and basically probably haunted, checked out the royal treasury which had all sorts of relics and artwork, took a sketchy elevator up one tower and gaped at the view, and then climbed 343 steps to the other tower and ended up in a gift shop. There's really cool paneling on the roof of the building, it's all different colored tiles making an intricate pattern and design of the eagle crest!

It was really windy on the top of St. Stephens, and the weather here has mostly fluctuated, but as a whole certainly warmer than Galway and plenty warm enough for ice cream. I'm still a bit jealous about everyone at home's Facebooks statuses about flip flops and sunburns, but it was so nice to soak in the little bits of sun we found. It was raining this morning a little as we made our way over to the Prater, which is a really neat outdoor amusement park. It's all kinds of historic and definitely has creepy parts that there's no way you could build in a new American theme park today, but I really did love the feel of it. I might get back there later on the trip, so I'll try hard to mention it again- especially the Ferris wheel.

I came to Austria very nervous about not knowing hardly any German, but it's been surprisingly easy to get by with a little guesswork on the menus and a lot of concessions on the part of the people we buy things from. Often, we sort of point at the food we want to order and attempt to pronounce the name, and they'll either smile or look exasperated and then switch to English. It's definitely a big change from being in Ireland. I think this trip is most like the one I took to Spain in 2008 more than anything else, partially because of the more European feel to everything and also because of the language barriers. I think here I'm a lot more willing to just break into English, but it is embarrassing. I wish I knew another language truly fluently.

The other thing about being here that makes it feel a lot like Spain is the fact that we're staying with my uncle, who works and lives here, so there's definitely the comfort of being with family in a home, as opposed to an ultra-budget hostel. It's easy to pop in and out, we can relax and spend free time at his house, and it's also just been great to catch up with him and my cousins as well. Hopefully, I'll get to spend more time with them this coming weekend.

Finally, the last nice plus of this week so far was the performance I attended tonight of the Vienna Symphonic Orchestra. It was all kinds of fancy and formal, with loads of older ladies and gentlemen walking around in their finest clothes and looking very snobby but also many of them seemed to truly love the music. I loved it too, but I don't think I had as much of a background in appreciation as they did. We got the cheap seats, although not the cheapest, which were standing room only in the very back. Ours were strange but interesting, we were literally onstage right behind the orchestra! The ticket when we bought it said 'obstructed view', but it wasn't actually obstructed, it was a good seat but still very odd. We were with a bunch of other tourists, but we liked to think that we were less obnoxious than they were- at least I wasn't taking any pictures!

Next time, I'll write a bit more about the cape people and Mozart and hopefully some giant pandas that I'm about to see tomorrow at the world's oldest zoo. Until then, gute nacht.