Viking River Cruise - Day 4 - Vienna

Okay, now we are in Vienna! So our River Cruise is one day behind, due to an accident... not sure how they are going to make up the time... but don't really care... it is marvellous out here!

This morning we headed off on a bus for our tour of Vienna. They started with a tour around the perimeter of the historical district showing all the important buildings and telling us things of historical note. I'm finding that there is so much information flying at me that it is all just going in and then out. I'm still enjoying admiring the beautiful buildings which is one of my favourite things about Europe!

Then they let us get off the bus and we started our walking tour in this square... which if I recall correctly has 3 museums all facing each other around a square.

Here is one of those museums... so pretty!

Next we headed into another square across the street where there was a fountain and some more pretty buildings.

Then we walked through another walkway (which was beautiful in itself) and ended up at this square. It almost feels like you are walking into another time (except for the occasional car!) and there are loads of these horse and carriages ferrying tourists around.

We continued on a walking tour seeing various historical buildings, the horse stables (no horses right now... apparently they send them on vacation to the South of Austria in July and August... kind of like summer vacation for kids... but for horses! ) and ended up at this beautiful cathedral. Guess who it is named after. Yep, Stephen... AGAIN! He is well revered in Hungary and Austria 👑

St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna, Austria

Steve took a million photos inside his cathedral, but I'm just including one 😉

After this our walking tour was over and we had what they like to call "free time". Angie and John had already been in Vienna for one day, so took us over to another church which they thought was better than St. Stephen's.

I think this one was called St. Peter's Cathedral

I'm almost starting to recognize the styles of church architecture here. This one is Baroque (I'm pretty sure), and they tend to be the most elaborate and glitzy ones. I always like to just sit down and look around while Steve takes photos. There is so much to look at. I'm always wondering about the building process. How long would it take? How did they do it? How many people had to do it? How do you plan something that elaborate?!?

After this we walked along and looked at the buildings and statues, snapped an anniversary photo of Senne and Dianne (48 years!) in Vienna and then Senne headed back to the bus to go back to the ship, while the rest of us stayed for more walking and exploring.

The Anniversary Photo!

We decided it would be a good idea to get some lunch before continuing on so stopped at a small outside cafe and had sausages and schnitzel. My sausage was wrapped in bacon and had cheese in the middle... and had some sort of fancy delicious mustard with it... it doesn't get much better than that!

After lunch we had to make a decision... the treasury or the royal residences. We decided on the treasury or Schatzkammer as they like to call it in Austria 😀 If we were here longer I would have loved to have seen the Royal Residences!

Anyway, the Schatzkammer was stuffed full of valuable relics (a piece of the tablecloth from the last supper???), vestments, treasures and jewels. It was fascinating to look at and read about (for the parts that had English explanations)! I think it was only about 12 Euros each to get in which was totally worth it.

Steve and I both loved the Knight's outfit. It was dark and you couldn't use flash, but this is a gorgeous purple colour. The intricate stitching must have taken forever to do by hand!

There were so many treasures and jewels! It was hard to pick just one photo![/caption]

There were some Roman ruins right in the middle of historic Vienna. Angie and I stopped to have a look at them, but apparently Steve thought we looked better than the ruins because you can't see them in the photo :)

 

We did a bit more walking. Of special note was a sign with an arrow that said "Time Travel Vienna". Angie and I were very interested, but we didn't make it back to find out what was happening in there! I REALLY wanted to know!

That evening we had a nice dinner and then the staff brought out a little cake and sang an anniversary song to Senne and Dianne. It was very sweet, but alas, I forgot the camera 🙁 Instead we went up to the sun deck after dinner and took some photos there. We did a little bit of photo taking, some card playing and some walking on the track. Often on riverboats another boat ties up next to you. Senne and John were making friends with the people on the other boat 😀

Here's the family photo: