Eastern Europe Day 06 - Vienna - Schönbrunn Palace

We're getting closer to the end of this trip now, with the second day in Vienna, Austria.

In the morning, the group had a planned tour of Schonbrunn Palace, which was one of the homes of the Hapsburg dynasty. As with many of the other European palaces owned by the wealthy families, it is absurdly opulent inside, and has a pretty cool garden outside.

No pictures on the inside of course, but the official site has a picture of each room. I've also got a tour book, but you'll have to visit me to see it ;) It was extremely crowded inside, with tons of tour groups. Unfortunately, they were all being conducted in different languages, which made things a bit chaotic.

The gardens were alright, with an odd open building at the back on top of a hill (they called it a gloriette). Since this was a group activity, we only had an hour or so to look at the gardens, so I was only able to see a little bit. There were a lot of people jogging in the gardens, since they are open to the public.

So here are some pictures of the gardens and the outside of the house.... (text continued below the pictures).






After we finished with the palace, we were dropped off back downtown to do what we wanted for the rest of the day.

Since I'm a museum geek, I was compelled to go to the main museum of art and antiquities, the Kunsthistorisches Museum [link 2](got to love the endless German names for things ;)

I really wished I had some more time there, since it was very cool. Tons of awesome paintings, and great Greek, Roman, and Egyptian stuff. I was almost jogging through, and maybe saw half of it in 3 hours. Most museums can really only be appreciated by residents of a city, since you really have to go back again and again to see everything. I bought a couple of books about the paintings and the older stuff, since no pictures allowed.

I finally gave in and went in search of some Austrian food. I ended up with some type of schnitzel thing, which was OK, but still not my favorite. Maybe I was just choosing the wrong restaurants, but none of the cuisines in Eastern Europe were very exciting. I did pick up a cookbook from the Sacher restaurant, which is supposed to be quite famous in Vienna, so we'll see if any of those recipes are good.

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