A Little Sightseeing with Visitors

These weeks have been super crazy with all sorts of pre-Christmas deadlines for school, plus getting everything in order for my family to come next week, and now I feel really behind on finishing these last couple entries from when my last set of visitors were here!  Let's see...I think I left off with Thanksgiving...so the week that followed was all spent in Vienna, except for one day in Bratislava, and we crammed in as much sightseeing stuff as we wanted to, leaving plenty of time for Christmas markets and coffee houses.

The day after Thanksgiving we decided to hop on the train to Bratislava for the afternoon.  It's a super easy trip from Vienna, plus I still think it's really cool that you can just run over to another country for lunch and be back in time for dinner.  Also, the sun is setting really early here now...generally about 4pm...so almost all of my pictures of things make it look like it's getting really late...when in reality we were there mid-afternoon.

We also happened to be there during their Christmas tree lighting in the main square, so the place was packed with people, complete with live music and a big dramatic lighting reveal. 

While in Vienna I was a bit sporadic with my picture taking.  Ryan and Teresa have much more complete pictures I'm sure, but somehow I'd end up with one or two pictures from one outing, and then dozens of pictures of my coffee cup...oh well. 

The church at the central cemetery here in Vienna

Brunch at our favorite spot at the Naschmarkt

Watching the lights go up on the Graben...sadly Ryan and Teresa left the day before the switched these on for real, so they missed the full effect...but at least they got to see them hanging up there

A trip to the Prater to ride the Riesenrad

And Ryan and I rode Break Dance...which is basically just completely crazy spinning plus crazy lights and loud music...super fun.

Museums Quartier

This is a 20 ton life size mosaic of the Last Supper at a church in the first district...I'd been to this church before on the Lange Nacht der Kirchen, but i'd never gotten to see this with the lights on (coin operated lights actually...which took us a minute to figure out)

A relaxing late afternoon coffee at Cafe Central...just one of many such outings.

The fall weather in Vienna is pretty foggy, we went a couple weeks without seeing any real sunshine, and during the whole time my visitors were in town I think the sun came out for a couple hours over an entire week.  I'd tried to take them up to Kahlenberg to my school twice, and we could barely see anything, but on the last day they were here we walked outside and could see a lot of blue sky so we hurried up there and walked down through the vineyards which was well worth it.

definitely just as beautiful in the cold autumn

And finally...we decided to go this new attraction downtown called Time Travel Vienna...which is a "5-D experience".  I have no idea what exactly that means...but a couple of my friends here had been excited to go check it out, so we thought out of town guests being here would be a good time to go.  And it was awesome.  It's about an hour of walking around underground through Vienna's history...complete with talking wax figures, 3-D movies where your seat moves and wind blows through your hair...and waltzing.

Now it's on to all things Vienna at Christmas...markets...lights...and just the right amount of snow at all times.