VIENNA » 14-18 March (4 nights)
Just an hour away by train from Bratislava, Slovakia, Vienna shocked me the second I arrived at the train station. The differences from Bratislava were as gigantic as anyone can try to imagine, and for some reason Vienna scared me. I was starting to fall in love with small places, and Vienna was HUGE, like so enourmous that trying to walk an entire avenue would take you at least half an hour or more.
Everything was too big, and being a solo traveler, I felt like a worm in the middle of all that mess! And well, I arrived sad to be leaving Bratislava so soon, so that may have help to the fact that Vienna got under my nerves pretty quickly.
Everything was too big, and being a solo traveler, I felt like a worm in the middle of all that mess! And well, I arrived sad to be leaving Bratislava so soon, so that may have help to the fact that Vienna got under my nerves pretty quickly.
I got to the hostel almost three hours after I arrived at the train station, simply because everything was way too far away, and of course I got lost over and over again, and stuff being written in German didn't actually help. Would you believe I felt more comfortable watching stuff written in all the other languages, from Slovakian to Hungarian, than I felt with the German thing in Austria? Yup, true story.
My room was dark, weird, and there was no wifi in the rooms, neither was in the entire hostel for that matter, and my first thought was "well, this is going to suck like hell!" I went out for a stroll, only to get back to the hostel about an hour later, not impressed by the streets, the crowds and the mess going on out there, and that was when everything changed! I got to my room and there were two girls there who turned my stay in Vienna around. In a couple of minutes we were instant friends! With nothing to do at the hostel (because it was total crap and there was no wifi), the three of us went to the movies! I don't think I ever paid as much to watch a movie at the cinema as I paid in Vienna (20€ for the movies and some coke and popcorn), but it was so, so worth it!
This was one of the best nights of my Europe solo backpacking trip, simply because I decided that night I wouldn't care about the money, I would spend what I had to spend and I would have fun without counting everything to the last cent! So I ended up in the movies, watching Kingsman, while Lea, the Italian girl, complained about how much the entire movie sucked, as me and Mel, American girl, laughed our asses off with the movie and with Lea!
I'm not going to stay here writting about monuments, sightseeing points in Vienna, because my four days there weren't about that. For me, this stay in Vienna was about meeting great people, have fun, stop worrying about how much money I was spending. It was about having partners in crime for three days, something I hadn't had the whole month before, about riding the metro without tickets and complaining all the time about how we were totally going to get arrested. It was about having Lea waking up with the sun and waking me and Mel up like the world was ending (and it was funny every time!). And it was the first time I actually saw what having no wifi can do to travelers, when that doesn't stop them from having a good time, so everyone would just come down from the rooms to have a couple of beers and try to get to know each other.
And the great thing about my stay in Vienna really was the fact that I never felt pushed to go watch some big Palace or that must-go-to place where all the tourists go to. We spent a morning exploring some walls where graffiti was legal, close to the river, we searched for a food market that turned out to be a great experience as everyone tried to sell as something, so they would offer us food over and over again, and we went looking for some huge Palace with a cool garden that was suppose to have a clear water thing that you could see some reflections and we got there only to discover there was no water fountain, and we got lost in the gardens trying to find the way out with some starving faces. Longest walk of our lives, Mel!
And I'm going to tell you a small secret here. Having a cute receptionist in a crappy hostel totally makes everything worth it, and a lot more fun (wink)