Weekend in Wien
Hi sweethearts,
Last week I spent my weekend in Vienna, the lovely capital city of Austria. So it was: Vienna vor the WI...weekend...
Vienna is famous for it's Lipizzaner horse shows, the tearooms with gorgeous pastries and the big Rathaus.
In today's post, I'll tell you guys how to spend only two days in Vienna, without missing out on any highlight.
I flew to Vienna on friday night, after work and came back on sunday night. It was the perfect getaway from my daily, busy life!
We started our first day at the Lipizzaner horse show. I booked my tickets online, to skip the line. On specific days, there are shows during th day. When we went there, there were only the rehearsal for the shows. Make sure to check out the official dates of the shows and rehearsals because there aren't shows daily.
The rehearsal starts at 10 a.m. and ends at 12 a.m..
You can see the horseback riders, teaching the horses what to do. On the horse, or next to the horse.
We stayed the full two hours because we love horses and we used to ride them weekly. If you don't know anything about horseback riding, you might spend less time at the rehearsal. But: it was a super cool location and ofcourse the horses are gorgeous.
Click here for the link to the site.
After the rehearsal we went to the Sisi museum next to the horse shows. You first see all the table decorations of that time and afterwards, you go to the apartments of Sisi.
The ground floor of the museum was, as you can see in the picture: all about the table settings. All the gold you see here, is solid, real gold. Extravaganza to the max!
At the first floor of the museum, you can learn more about the life of Sisi and her daily routines (such as combing her hair for 2 hours). I couldn't take pictures there but you can see a lot of pictures on the official website.
We spend about 2 hours inside the museum. This means, when we left the museum it was about 2 p.m. and we were getting hungry. So we went to the mos famous Café of Vienna: Café Central.
Vienna has THE best pastries in the world. At the Café, you could choose from all the pastries you could possibly imagine. The even had a vegan one, yas!
The pastries look very fancy and cost about 5 euros.
There was a waiting line to enter the cafe but we didn't have to wait too long. I guess we waited about 15 minutes.
After a late non-healthy lunch, we went to the Stephansdom. This is the biggest cathedral of the city. To me, this was the least interesting building. It's very big but also very dark and empty. I imagined it to be a lot more decorated with gold and beautiful paintings. This was sadly not the case. BUT the dom is free to visit....
After this, we wanted to go see the Freud museum. It had been raining non stop so we wanted to visit a lot of inside- highlights instead of walking outside in the rain all day.
We walked to the museum on the other side of the city center and had a lot of great expectations. Freud is very famous for his psycho analysis and in each school I went, I learned about him. Stepping into his life would be super interesting.
But yeah, as you can imagine by the way I'm speaking.... the museum was a total disappointment. The museum was very expensive, I think it was over 12 euros per person. The museum was also totally empty. On tripadvisor, I read that you could see the famous chair where his clients had to lay down in for therapy but this was not the case. You could only see some books or personal sketches (or writings) but that was it. There was only one room still decorated with the original interior....
Considering the price and the long walk you have to make, I would skip this highlight...
But I do have an other option for you guys that we didn't know about. If we knew that Freud would be so uninteresting, we would have went to this other highlight instead! I'll tell you more about it later.
First, dinner! Since the Café of our afternoon-tea was so gorgeous and the food was very good, we decided to have dinner there as well. They had a vegan/veggie option so we went for it! Oh yeah, after dinner, ofcourse we had to take some desserts too, again haha!
Here's my other highlight option that you've been waiting for! The ice skating park called "the Wiener Eistraum"!
In front of the Rathouse there's a large square. In the winter you can go ice skating there. I said that it was a park, since it's not just an ice skating rink, it's an entire park. You have the main square (in the pic) and then you have a loth of smaller paths to take and you even have higher levels above the ground with pretty views.
It's open from half january untill march. Oh god, how stupid we were not to know about this because it would have been soooo much fun to try out!
And then, when you're completely tired from day one, you can go back to your hotel, take a nice cup of tea and go to bed.
Day 2: Sisi again, duh!
I got tickets online for the other Sisi museum (the Schonbrunn palace). I'd reccomend getting tickets online because there can be a lot of tourists. We didn't have a lot of tourists but that's probably because it wasn't high season. To go there, you need to take a bus or tram/metro. It's a bit further away from all the other city highlights.... This is the only ticket for public transportation we got, because all the other highlights are pretty near to each other.
You can get tickets for 2 different tours. A big tour and a smaller tour. We took the big tour because I wanted to see it all! There were 40 rooms to visit, all still in original barok/roccocco state.
The interiors of the appartments were just stunning. I couldn't take pics inside (again, ugh...) but I took a lot of pictures outside the palace. In this pic, I went uphill to the back of her garden, to have the most stunning view over the palace. On the left side of the pic, you can see some snow. There are the hills of Vienna where you can go skiing! I'm sorry for the foggy pic, we didn't have the weather as our friend this weekend.
After Sisi, we went back to the city center. We hiked a bit through all the streets and went to the Museum Square. The square itself is beautiful. In all the buildings next to this square, there are musea inside. Literally all kinds of musea. If you have enough time in Vienna, maybe you should check them out!
After our morning hike through the city, we went to the Imperial Treasury. This is probably the place that I'll remember most about my trip. Before going there, I would have said that the Schonbrunn palace was my number one fave highlight, but the Treasury was even crazier to visit! All the gold, the gorgeous fabrics of the clothes, all the perfect rhinestones, diamonds, cristals... I just have no words for what I've seen there.
If you love a bit of over the top luxury, you'll love this museum!
A tip: you can get a combitickets for most of the musea!
And so, after the museum we had our last late lunch (with pastries, duh).... and we left the city to fly back home.
By this, my trip to Vienna ended but my memories will last forever (like a total cliché).
So, would you go to Vienna, even if it's just for two days?
I think that I wouldn't fly all the way back because the city was gorgeous but didn't totally blew me away... But it I'd be around (like when I visit Bratislava or so), I'd might come back! Even if it's just for the horseys haha!
X Steph