Day 36 - Vienna

We slept in abit and then took off for the palace of the emperors of Austria up until about WW1. We were supposed to meet up with Erin at the subway station just outside the palace, but didn't end up seeing her so we went ahead without her. James, an Aussie from Tazmania came with us too.

James was in our room, but crazily enough i'd sat next to him on a train from Florence to Milan back over 3 weeks ago before meeting up with Rob. Its crazy just how small is for that. Its happened to me a bunch of times now. I had two English brothers in my room in Rome (my first time in Rome) who i met again in the Cinque Terre on the trail; Phil, the Aussie we met in Innsbruck we ran into again in Interlaken; the brothers from Bowmanville who we shared a room with in Innsbruck literally bumped into us in the Sistine Chapel; and that jackass who told us to get off the train early in Innsbruck ran into us again in Naples (he's lucky we didn't beat him up). Pretty nuts.

So anyways, the three of us did the palace tour and wandered around the gardens outside. The palace tour was alrite, but not as good as the one in Stuttgart probably because this one was much more modern. It was home to Maria Theresa, mother of Marie Antoinette, and lots of the tour focussed on her and her husband and family. It was the same place, in this huge beautiful ballroom we got to go in, where the famous meeting between Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev took place during the Vienna Summit where Khrushchev said to Kennedy "Its up to the US to decide whether there will be war or peace." "The decision to sign a peace treaty is firm and irrevocable, and the Soviet Union will sign it in December if the US refuses an interim agreement.", to which Kennedy responded, "Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold winter." So the place where the Cold War started. Feel free to correct me though if my history is off.... The gardens were pretty sweet too and i found it nuts how they made everything so huge, yet so perfectly symmetrical. It was pretty awesome.

We got back to the hostel around 4 and lazed around abit, and then hit happy hour (2 hours actually) from 6-8, and then wen went with James to this really cheap schnitzel place he'd heard about. For 5 Euro we got a huge schnitzel, fries, and a salad. Great deal. Soon as we got our schnitzels, i was digging into it when all of a sudden my plate did a perfect backflip and crashed and broke at my feet. The table we were at was really small and i guess my plate was only half on the table so when i went to cut, it flipped it off. The lady running the came right over and was really nice and kept telling me not to worry about it adn gave me a free one pretty much right away.

After dinner we went back and hung out with a bunch of people from the hostel and played a bunch of foosball. Me and Rob beat a few teams, but got our asses handed to us by two Austrian local guys (they beat us 4 games to 1) and we also got embarassed by two butchie Austrian girls(using the word 'girls' loosely).

Off to Budapest tomorrow!