Vienna

My apartment in Vienna is located in a residential neighborhood & is only a few minutes from a subway station.  It only takes 10-15 minutes on the subway to most of the tourist sites.  

The first day in Vienna, I visited the Schonbrunn palace which is where the Austrian monarchy resided until the early 1900s.  It is the most visited tourist attraction in Austria.  Unfortunately there were several tourist buses that arrived at the same time that I did.  I had an audio guide for the palace tour of 41 rooms.  It was a little tough to see everything because of all the tour groups.  The Hapsburg family ruled much of Central & Eastern Europe for hundreds of years, so there was a lot of interesting history on the tour.  I spent the rest of my time touring the palace grounds & gardens.

I spent my second day in Vienna in the main tourist area that contains the museums, large churches, & the central shopping district.  I went to a large art museum which had a collection of Egyptian art, renaissance paintings, & antiques from the Hapsburg dynasty.  I did a walk through the town & had lunch.  

I visited St. Stephens church which looked similar to the famous church I visited in Zagreb with roof that has a tapestry look to it.  The tower to the top had 343 steps up a long windy staircase, near the top I started feeling like the people you see at the baseball game that get spun around in a circle holding a bat.  The views from the top of the city were nice.  After this I headed home & got some takeout for dinner.  

I found a really nice place to run about 5 minutes away from the apartment.  It is a 13 mile long island in the Danube river.  There are several paved paths running the length of the island with lots of runners, cyclists, & rollerbladers using it especially in the evening.  The weather was great for running & I got in 3 runs there.

Tomorrow it is on to Bratislava, Slovakia which is only an hour from Vienna.  The bus from Vienna stops in Bratislava only about 2 minutes from my hotel, so I decided to take the bus instead of the train.