Holiday in Vienna

We stayed overnight at London Heathrow before flying to Vienna the next morning. We shared a private taxi to our hotel with another couple, as our driver was stuck in traffic due to the many road works happening at the time. They had been to the hotel a few times before.

When we arrived at our hotel we were allocated our room on the 6th floor. It was very nice. The weather was pleasant. We went for a walk around the area to get our bearings, stopping at a small café for a drink and a bite to eat. We found an Indian restaurant for our evening meal, as this was near our hotel! There was plenty of choice for breakfast at our hotel and the service was very efficient and pleasant.

The next day we went into the centre of Vienna, where there are lots of impressive buildings. At St. Stephen’s Cathedral there was a long queue, so we just took photographs. Eventually we walked down to a bridge over the Danube, it’s not blue! But then apparently it has never been blue, just maybe a green colour sometimes or a mostly muddy brown, but it was impressive anyway. We walked past several of the river cruise ships and they seemed bigger than I had imagined they would be. Vienna has a café culture, we had lunch in pleasant surroundings and watched the world go by.

The next day we bought a hop-on hop-off bus pass, (I always find that difficult to say for some reason) which covered the rest of the days we were there. The information supplied by the company via the headphone was very interesting, explaining the places we drove past, their history and the various statues of famous people associated with Vienna. We also visited Belvedere Palace gardens, which were beautiful.

The hotel gave us several leaflets, amongst them were some featuring various musical evenings. My husband said we don’t want these and was about to dispose of them, but I thought you can’t go to Vienna and not have a taste of the music that the city is famous for.

One of our hop-on hop-off trips took us to the Schoenbrunn Palace, which was the former imperial summer residence of the ruling family. We did a tour, very opulent inside and lovely gardens.

There was a kiosk outside where tickets were being sold for concerts held in the palace. They hold most of these, featuring music and dancing in the orangery, but we were told about one they offer once a month, on Thursday, held in the Imperial Ballroom. To my husband’s relief this didn’t have any ballet, just music and two singers. We decided on this one and bought VIP tickets. We sat in the front row and the concert consisted of Mozart in the first half and Strauss in the second half, with a glass of champagne in the interval if you wished. There was a male singer and a female one, she was very good, very expressive. The male singer was very good as well. We had used the underground system to go to the Schoenbrunn Palace, this involved a change of trains, but the service was very regular and extremely efficient. We saw the female singer on the platform and my husband went and congratulated her on her performance.

We really enjoyed the concert and I was so pleased we went. This rounded off our trip in a great way.