Vienna,Austria

Our trip to Vienna began with an interesting night train. We were in a cabin with 3 other people, 2 girls that we met who went to NC state and an old German man. He insisted that we pull our chairs out and make a huge bed,which did not turn out as planned. He snoozed the whole 9 hours unlike us 4 others. Luckily the 2 girls that we met were really cool, being forced to make due with the room we were squished in. We arrived in Vienna at 745 am, grabbed some breakfast, and checked into our hostel. We then made our way down to the Old town, the center or the city, stopping at some shops along the way. We first stopped at the Habsburg Palace and were harassed by a Mozart maniac to buy tickets for a Mozart performance. Denying the tickets, we went into what appeared to be a large greenhouse, but was actually a butterfly house. We went into it and walked around for a few minutes observing all the butterflies. It started to rain once we got out so we made our way back towards the hostel. We stopped and grabbed lunch at a German restaurant where I got a Viennese meal of roasted pork with a side of dumplings and sauerkraut. We then headed back to get settled in and took a short, much needed nap. That afternoon we headed back towards the center and saw the Stephanplatz Cathedral. We walked around this area, full of shops and restaurants. People were set up in the middle of the streets playing classical music. We loved hearing this everywhere we went, as we were in the city of classical music. We ate dinner at Swarovski Wien cafe, a little cafe located outside of the Swarovski store in the middle of the walking path. We both enjoyed a couple glasses of wine and a pizza. Not knowing that Swarovski was founded in Austria, we decided it was ok if we ate there since we were getting a little of the Austrian culture, right? After this we went to grab desert at Hotel Sacher to try the famous torte that Brooke's friend told us we must try while in Vienna. It was basically just a chocolate cake with hardened chocolate icing on the outside, which was great despite the simple explanation. We decided to head back to the hostel and get some sleep because we wanted to wake up early to site see and the beds had down comforters at our hostel...needless to say we slept amazing and got some of the best sleep of our entire trip. We woke up the next day and went to the Schönbrunn Palace, the palace that the Hofsburg Monarchy lived in during the warm months. We took the 45 minute tour, equipped with the audio guide. It walked us through a bunch of the rooms and told us some of the interesting facts about the purpose of each room. After this we grabbed some lunch and our bags and decided we'd leave Vienna a little earlier than we expected and head to Prague!
I wish that we had a little more time in Vienna to explore the history but we are so excited for Prague, as everyone has said this is one of their favorite cities in Europe (and really cheap! which will be a nice change).