So Monday evening we just hung out in the hostel, and played Scrabble. There were a lot of people from Mexico and South America, and even some people from Chile, so Maggie got to speak in Spanish some and I managed a few sentences myself!
Tuesday we started the day by walking to the Shonbrunn Palace (I think that the names of most of the places in this journal are misspelled, but I just never have time to look them up). It is a very impressive palace - yellow, like most Hapsburg palaces - and huge. We took a tour of part of the residences, and it was really interesting because the people who lived there were people we knew at least a bit about - Maria Theresa was the mother of Marie Antoinette, and Franz Joseph was the Kaiser (emperor) up until the middle of World War I. Knowing that the palace had been lived in so recently and seeing the rooms with their original furnishing and even family photographs was very cool. At the end, we thought we might be able to sneak under the rope to join the long tour (we took the short, less expensive tour) but decided against it.
After seeing the inside of the palace, we went around back to the gardens, and climbed another slight hill (can't visit a city without climbing a hill - our legs are quickly turning to steel) to see the palace from a distance and the entire city behind it. We even took some nice photos of Maggie doing cartwheels on the grass (quickly, since we weren't supposed to be on the grass). Right in front of the palace they were setting up a stage for something, and we later found out that tomorrow there will be a free concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, and if the weather is nice they are expecting 100,000 people. I am so so so sad that we will already be gone. That would have been amazing.
I will finish later - on to Prague tomorrow morning!
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