So all, I am home, but i've still got a few more things to wrap up here. So I'll tell you first about Vienna, the home of Christmas markets. Getting there was pretty terrible. We flew on Lufthansa, and had a layover in Munich, and both legs of the journey were turbulent as any turbulence I've ever experienced in my life. THe first, though, was not as bad as the second. On the second flight, I was sitting in an exit row. The turbulence was so bad that I accidentally grabbed the guys leg sitting next to me instead of the arm rest, but neither of seemed to care because we were both just terrified for our lives. Then, for some random, horrible reason, the lights went on, including the lights above the emergency exit. Which I was sitting next to. My immediate thought was... oh s*&! we are all going to need to jump out of this plane, and I need to rip this door off and get everyone out. My friend who was sitting diagonally behind me said she looked at me when the lights went on and this: :0 was my face. Anyway, mercifully, we did not die and we landed (really damn roughly) back onto the beautiful, wonderful ground.
When we landed, we were all so traumatized that we went straight to the hostel and turned in for the night. I had a room with one of my friends and the other 3 were in another room. My room sucked with people talking in "yell"whispers at 1 am on the night before we left (at 5 am) and a woman who decided it was a great idea to rip open the curtains every day at 8 am. Hello. Rude.
Unfortunately on this trip I had a bunch of homework to do, so the next day, Friday, we worked on homework for the better part of the morning. At around 1, we decided to head out for lunch. The other girls in our group had explored around a bit, except for me and the other friend in my room, and so the others said they had a section of town to go to for lunch. Unfortunately, yet it ended up being fortunately, there was a major mess-up in reading the map. There was one market we had agreed we wouldn't try to get to because it was completely in the opposite direction of all of the other markets. Where do you think we accidentally ended up for lunch? You got it. Schonbrunn Palace. THis ended up being my favorite one. It wasn't a huge tourist mob scene, the palace was striking, and there was a gigantic Christmas tree right in the middle. Each hut was unique with hand-crafted goodies and trinkets, and hot wine and cocoa. And hot wine.
After we wandered around for a bit, we ate at the restaurant attached to the palace. Classy place known for the strudel. It was SO good.
From here we made our way back to the hostel, warmed up and went to find the next one in the evening. It was a big one by a major shopping street. The name is escaping me, but it was huge and wound up and down a whole bunch of streets. We had "orgasmic hot chocolate" which was like Aztec cocoa aka it had chili pepper in it. We got hot dogs that were pretty much in giant rolls and we found some cookies and stuff. We also drank a Christmas tree..... it was this "wine"stuff but made with not-grapes. So they made one with pine trees, And it was Christmas in my mouth. The market was magical with crowds of people and cheer and hot wine and lights. It even flurried a bit. The little huts were decked out with wreathes, garland, lights, trees, and everything else one could imagine. It was great. But we were there as it was closing, and we resolved ourselves to go back the next day, then find the major one at Rathausplatz, the one in the park at Karlsplatz, and the one on Museumstrasse (surrounded on all sides by museums).
We began our journey trying to find Karlsplatz the next morning, and walked for what seemed like an eon before we found the park. By this point it was snowing quite hard, and so we made a B-line for hot chocolate stand. I got orange hot chocolate. It was delicious. For some reason, this one was slightly less impressive than the one at Schonbrunn, but still good. I didn't buy anything here, but there were sheep!
We moved on from there to the one surrounded by museums after having a horrible lunch with the meanest waiter on the face of the planet earth. Fortunately, this one had some redeeming value; it was big and spread out with a lot of interesting booths. I bought mom a ring and got (more) mugs of hot wine. THey had one price for the wine, but then charged you extra for the mug they give you so it ended up being pretty expensive. We saw booths with blown glass and interesting art, snowglobes, and stunning masquerade masks.
Then we headed to the huge market at Rathausplatz in front of the Parliament. It was overwhelmingly large with SO many tourists. Not to mention that, but many of the booths held the same goodies such as cookies, hot wine and whatnot. That doesn't matter, though, it was absolutely breathtakingly beautiful. THe building and the enormous tree in front of it, and the astounding size of the market. I got some cookies and some gloves and hot wine.
Overall, it was an incredible experience filled with glittering lights and good food and hot wine and SNOW. We even managed to watch Jack Frost and WHite Christmas at the hostel. It was a really amazing weekend and really got me into the Christmas spirit. I love Vienna, and would LOVE to go back to Austria again at some point in my life.
It was really, really wonderful.
xx Edie