Our Trip to Austria!! Day 2~ Exploring the City and History!

We took a walking tour of Vienna today after our morning Edward Jones Meetings. We saw A LOT!! Everything is very close together and you can get a really good idea of the history and how things were so long ago! We enjoyed all of the places we visited today!

This is the main pedestrian shopping street.

These 2 pictures are the house where Mozart died.

His home is now a museum.

Marie Teresia numbered all the houses...she was the only female monarch

to rule Austria and was the famed Marie Antoinette's mother.

Franciscan church with a statue of Moses in the front.

There are churches and cathedrals EVERYWHERE here!

Old town Vienna...

Where Mozart lived... his contemporaries, Beethoven and Hayden visited him here.

Walking toward St. Stephan's Cathedral through a tunneled courtyard.

Saint Stephan's Cathedral...it started to rain so good thing our tour covered going inside!

Beautiful roof tiles! Each province of Austia was in charge of restoring some part of

this cathedral after it was bombed in WWII. Vienna's job was this roof!

Inside the cathedral...an ornate podium made out of marble with

carvings of all the different scholars...knowledge was power to the monarchy!

Beautiful stained glass windows that also had to be replaced after the war...

Winged altar of Mary's life.

This section depicts the birth of our Savior.

The high altar and a picture of Stephan being stoned to death.

A closer look...

Here is the very front of the cathedral.

This statue was erected as a tribute to the Gods when the plague was over--

it depicts clouds with the king bowing at the base and the holy trinity at the top.

Entrance to the Imperial Palace.

Roman ruins uncovered in front of the Imperial Palace they discovered when digging to build the Subway... it was moved to a different location so they could preserve these ruins.

The whole city is built on this stuff!

The Palace is HUGE! This is an inner courtyard...there were many! This palace stretches for over a full mile. It currently houses the Austrian Parliament and the President's office-- our "White House". There are also MANY museums inside all of these buildings!

Steps to the Albertina Museum. This is the wing of the palace where the king's daughter lived and is a combination of the name of her husband and her. (Her husband's name was Albert but I can't remember her name.) This king was in power for 63 years until the monarchy fell in the early 1900's.

Here's the Opera House. The locals say it looks more like a train station! This building is recently famous for being in the movie "Mission Impossible 5"

with Tom Cruise, where he slid off the roof with the girl in his arms!

The next 7 pictures are of our beautiful room at the Ritz!

Here's our closet! It took me a while to figure out that it was a

door to the closet and not just a picture on the wall!

Here it is closed...

We wanted some Austrian Sausage sandwiches. We asked our tour guide where a good place to go was and she said here, "over by the Opera House with the green bunny on top."

So for dinner we walked over to this street vendor...

...and enjoyed our dinner! We had the sausage sandwich that has the melted cheese in it. The concierge at the hotel also recommended this place as a great street vendor and both she and the tour guide said to get the sausage with the melted cheese. They told us the name of it and it was a good thing because everything on the menu was in German so when we found it, we just pointed to it! Luckily everyone here speaks English and they are very polite and helpful. They eat this sausage on a piece of rye bread which was really dry and yucky... I would've preferred in on a bun.

But it was good!

After dinner we took a walk and found this beautiful park right next to our hotel. It's HUGE and had statues of famous dead people all over it! Everyone we talked to said it is very safe so I ran here the next morning. It was a beautiful park, but the only place in the entire city where people littered, and it was covered in litter, which is so unfortunate because it was so beautiful! The rest of the city had absolutely NO litter which is so weird to find a place so covered in it! It's called Stadt Park.