Hotels in Vienna Vacations and Vienna Travel Guide<< >> Vienna vacations can be as long or as short as you want them to be. Great buildings. Wide avenues. Music and culture. Waltzes. Horse carriage rides. A great cafe society. All are on display here. We decided on a brief day visit. As we were in Prague we thought we might as well have a day in the city. This is not, I suspect, the first thought in most people’s minds when they visit Prague but we thought it was doable. So we did it. We looked to see the best way to get there and it was by coach. This wasn’t the cost alone it was the timing. The train is only 15mins quicker and wouldn’t have given us as much time in Vienna because of departure times. I am used to travelling 3 to 4 hours by coach but I was wary of the five hours it would take us. I needn’t have worried, the service was efficient, the seats comfortable and tea, coffee or chocolate was served free of charge. If you could read Czech then there were also free newspapers and magazines. All this was a fraction of the cost to travel by the ‘express’ train, the Pandolino. For those wishing to stay in the city there is a great array of hotels in Vienna.
We chose the stop near the Opera House, as this is the stop to catch all three of the hop on hop off buses. Because we only had six hours this was the best way to see as much as possible, quickly and then get off to see some things in more detail. This article will act as a brief Vienna travel guide and if you are going yourself you will be able to buy one. Our first route was to see the Schonenberg Palace. We debated whether to go into the palace but decided it would take up too much time. As with all hop on hop off buses we had a commentary via our headphones and I do think this is an excellent way to get a flavour of any city. Many of the buildings were magnificent and the broad streets and avenues made it easy to imagine how the city would have looked without all the modern day traffic. I don’t know much about the ruling families of Austria except many of them were Hapsburgs and the most famous female member must be Marie Antionette, and of the others Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose assassination in Sarajevo sparked off the first world war. Between buses we wandered around the Opera House area and even toyed with the idea of having coffee and cake at the Hotel Sacha. However there were long queues and the service was leisurely so we gave it miss. This area is the place to go for designer shops and lots of cafes to sit and watch the world go by, after all the Viennese invented the café culture so we are grateful to them for that.
As we neared the end of this tour we were in an old part of the city where the streets were so narrow that the bus could only just get by. This is where Mozart had lived for a few years and composed The Barber of Seville there. We got off the bus here and enjoyed a little while exploring the narrow streets and squares. Eventually the heat got too much and we spied a very busy ice cream parlour. I wish I could remember the name because the ice cream was superb, and I am not an ice cream lover. We ate it sitting on the steps of a statue to Guttenberg, this seemed to be a popular place to sit. All to soon it was time to catch the Metro back to our bus pick up point. You don’t even pretend to have seen Vienna in such a short time but quick visits give you an over all flavour of a city and give you an idea of whether or not you would like to spend longer there. I am glad we had our day in Vienna. << >>
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