DAY 9 - Budapest, Vienna

12.6.2019

Today we made our way from Budapest to Vienna. We started with another early breakfast in the hotel, then battled the elevators to all get down to the lobby in time for the bus departure at 0800.

We had a couple hours of traffic on our way to the border and we stopped just short of Austria for lunch. From there we made it to the hotel a few minutes early and had some free time to stand outside and stretch our legs before starting the city tour.

The first stop we made was at the Hundertwasser house, designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser. It was really cool to see something that is different in one of our stops, it broke the sort of constant kinds of architecture that we’ve been seeing so far on our trip. I think we all had just a bit of difficulty with the rolling floors and the wonky staircases.

After that we went to the Belverdere  palace where we took another big group picture (the Canada flag was highest) and we also got to see the Vienna skyline. I think we all really wanted to go swimming in the fountain because of how hot it’s been on this trip and especially today.

From there we made our way through Vienna seeing parks, palaces and embassies as well as the city’s architecture. We ended up at the Schönbrunn palace where we had the Imperial tour, where we got an audio device that led us through the palace seeing the apartments where the royal family lived. It was really cool to see because we had learned about the French Revolution in school and this was the palace where Marie Antoinette spent the early years of her life.

After the tour was finished we had to wait outside for the other groups to finish and for the busses to get there. With the sheer amount of people and tour groups there our busses didn’t actually have space to properly park on the side of the road in the bus lane, so they stopped in the lane for us to all run on, right in front of a police car. Luckily, he seemed to have other places to be and didn’t care that we were blocking a lane of traffic.

To end the night some of us went for a walk across the Reichsbrüke bridge over the Danube to see the sunset and go swimming.

Bruno, Andrew, Giacomo, Saim, Greta, Tanja