Vienna 12/4

Today was our big day in Vienna. When we got up in the morning, Sally went out to the grocery store and the bakery and came back with breakfast. She prepared for us a very typical breakfast with an egg eaten out of the shell with a little spoon, cut up veggies, multigrain rolls, thinly sliced meats, nutella, and then croissants and an apple filled pastry. 

From there we headed out to explore the city. The first place we went was to Flohmarkt which is a little flea market on Saturday mornings near her house. It had  bunch of old and antique type things that people were selling or just second hand stuff. They had a quite a few of those really old watches on chains too. From there we went to the Naschmarkt right next to his which has a lot of exotic foods and spices. Usually they give out a lot of samples to people going by, but it was crowded so they weren't doing it. 

After that we went to the main shopping street we went in a little jewelry store, and a bunch of cool clothing stores too. Some of the stores are the same as what they have in Madrid, but a lot were really different. I didn't buy anything there, but it was still fun to go and look at the clothes and styles there, which I do like a lot. 

Following that we went to St. Stevens cathedral which is the really famous church in the middle of the city. Some of the outside was covered because they were fixing it, but it was huge, amazing, and beautiful. It was really crowded and difficult to get in but worth it. It was very baroque with lots of decorations, and inside it had many paintings and large stained glass windows. It was a very long church but we could only get into the very front part of it, also adding to how tightly packed all of the people were. 

Near there we stopped into a little tea shop where one of Sally's friends works and she had worked for a bit once during the holiday season. There were many many different kinds of green, black, and fruit teas in large containers on the walls. The people working there could let you smell them or decide which kind you wanted, and then they would pour them into big fancy gold scales to weigh out a certain amount, and then they packaged them up into little cute bags. They had some christmas teas and I really liked the smell of the Wintertraum one.

After that we headed to Demel which is a famous pastry shop and chocolatier. We probably wouldn't have gone there, since Sally didn't know much about it before, but I received a mandate from my grandmother that I had to make sure to go there while I was in Vienna and have their hot chocolate with whipped cream. So we went there, got a spot at the cafe, and my grandmother treated the three of us to this treat. It was absolutely delicious. Sally hadn't heard much about the place before so was very surprised, and the three of us agreed that it was the best hot chocolate we had ever had in our lives.

After that we wandered around the city a bit more and then headed back to Sally's apartment to relax. I was going to have a surprise skype date with my grandma via my dad who was there visiting her, but we changed it to Monday, her 90th birthday, instead. The city, in all the beautiful snow, is one of the prettiest things I have seen in my entire life. Even without the snow, many of the buildings are grand and magnificent on their own. Here are a couple pictures of walk around town:

                                              

After relaxing for a while, Laura and I headed out to the opera. Vienna is famous for classical music and they have a famous and very nice opera house. All of the normal tickets we sold out both nights we were there and very expensive. However, if you go 1-2 hours before the show, the night of the show (there is a different show every night) you can buy standing room tickets for 3.50 euros- very cheap. We got, got our tickets, and then went and claimed our spot by tying our scarves to the pole. Not knowing what opera we were going to see, Laura recognized it as the Barber of Seville from the opening music, which is I guess a famous opera. It was really good and a lot of fun, even though we had to stand the whole time. Oh and one thing that was really cool was that in front of each seat (or standing spot) they had little screens where you could pick the language and it would tell you what the people were singing in your own language) 

In our free time before the opera we wandered around the different floors and explored. In my jeans and black sweater (the nicest clothes I had) I felt extremely underdressed walking around with all the rich people in their very nice clothes for going to the opera in Vienna. Everything was exquisitely decorated and felt very rich. We even walked through a ballroom and I just had to stop and picture a ball going on in the olden days and all the pretty ladies in their beautiful music dancing to a live orchestra.