Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens

It was somewhat harder than we had first thought to get from Venice to Vienna.

The people at Trent Italia were giving us peanuts, largely due to their online booking system which had crashed, and whenever we attempted to call the OBB head office in Austria, it was all in indecipherable German lingo, and to make matters worse, the line kept dropping out. Bahhhhh! This chain of events lead us to taking our chances down at the Venice bus terminal, early on the morning of the 7th of August, wishing, hoping and praying that someone would let us on a bus, and we could make it to Villach, just over the Austrian border.

So there we sat and waited in the depot, bus spotting, until an OBB bus appeared. We raced over and tried to communicate our needs, and all we could gather was that the bus was fully booked, but in the case there was a cancellation, the driver would let us on. He told us to wait at the depot for another hour until he returned. Exactly one hour later, the bus pulled in, he accepted our cash and sent us up to the top of the bus. Yessss. It became more and more apparent, as the bus edged closer and closer to the Austrian border, how fortunate we had been to get a seat at Venice- with each stop, more and more people got on, and the bus became increasingly crowded. There were altercations over who was sitting in whose seat, disgruntled children crying, and their parents ill at ease, as well as folks perched on the stair case because there were no seats left.

We stopped at a little town just before the Austrian border called Udine, where a woman and her 15 month old daughter Christene came and sat beside me (her 8 year old son had managed to get a seat, but her poor husband was sitting on the stair case). This woman, who never told me what her name was, told me that she spoke 5 different languages (her husband, who worked in International affairs spoke 8!), was an Austrian, and had been holidaying with her family in Italy- she proceeded to chew my ear off whilst sporadically breast feeding her daughter, for the next hour, as we crossed the Austrian border, and passed through the Alps. Although the conversation, and her constant questioning demanded a lot of my attention and eye contact, I still managed to get a good look at the tremendous Austrian Alps. I didn't get to say a proper good bye to this woman when our bus pulled into Villach, because as soon the bus stopped, everyone was in a mad rush to collect their baggage and make it to connecting trains.

Due to the lengthy line at the ticket booth, we missed the 3:15pm train to Vienna, and had to wait two hours for the next one. No matter- we found a cafe, 'Angebot' scrawled on the top of the sign, ate Fritz buns and looked through our cameras to pass the time.

The slow moving train ride to Vienna took a further four hours, but the views from the carriage window, as it weaved through the Austrian Alps, were spectacular. Our train, which had been delayed a further 20 minutes in Villach rolled into Vienna a bit before 10pm. When we approached the information desk, we were attended to by a rather gruff Austrian fellow who barked the Tram number we needed to take, and literally scribbled the name of the station we were to get off at, and said firmly, "You walk from there!" The transaction had evidently finished when he slammed down the map- BANG! NEXT! Geeeeeppppers.

After managing to find the tram out the front of the station, and make sure it was travelling in the right direction, we got off where we were advised to, and from what I could tell, it was the middle of nowhere. We asked some women, who appeared to be locals, if they could please point us in the right direction, but after speaking with them, I felt even more confused! And so, we hailed a taxi. You're probably thinking- pathetic- but seriously, I'm so glad we did- there's no way we would have found the place we were staying otherwise.

Being the absolute tourists we had become, we had made our way to the sight of the Viennese Opera house by 11am the following morning, to hop on a red city tour bus. The audio assisted tour took us on a fabulous trip around Vienna- past the Hofburg, the Heldenplatz, the Viennese Parliament buildings, the Rathhaus, the Burgtheatre before stopping at Hundertwasser Haus (picture below).

My former collegue, Fran Steffanoni, had told me all about Hundertwasser, and his work; she had even made a pilgramage to his former New Zealand abode in 2007. I also knew of his work, largely because of his inspiration drawn from Gaudi; and although I haven't travelled to Barcelona yet, I plan to- if for no other reason than to see his genius at work! But, Hundertwasser's work will certainly do for the meantime! The brightly and multi-coloured walls, with curved lines seperating the colours, mosaic decoration and flower pots and tress seemingly growing out of the windows and the roof tops-Glorious!

From Hundertwasser's Haus, we crossed over the Danube River (which isn't even close to being blue, just in case you were wondering), to the section of Vienna that could be viewed as the city's business district; sky scrapers, offices, factories and so on. We circled around this development for a little while before coming back over the Danube, past the Aussatellungs strabe, round the Pratersterns Amusement park, to St. Stephen's Cathedral; another gothic inspired church with magnificent steeples. On the way back to where the tour started, we drove down the Schubertring, the Johaan Strauss memorial and park lands, the Karlskirche, the Musikverein and the magnificent Opera building. When the tour concluded, I decided to wander back to the Hofburg, where the Imperial Apartments are located, and many memorial statues to Prince Eugene, and to the Mozart Memorial (below) which is close to the Hofburg.

From the Mozart Memorial, we walked through the centre of old-Vienna, filled to the brim with exquisite architecture on pristine streets and park lands, back to St. Stephen's Cathedral for closer inspection.

Given that we were catching a train to Prague at around 4:30pm that afternoon, we had to bounce from the city centre (in particular the upstairs cafe where we were eating lunch, and playing far too much James Blunt for my liking) soon after 2pm, collect our backpacks, quickly find some crisp apple strudels and sadly, leave Wein.