We arrived at the station in Salzburg with plenty of time to travel to Vienna. We learned our lesson in Paris!
It was a pretty quick trip (3 hours), and much to my delight I discovered that the trains in Austria didn’t bother me. Very good news as the ride from Vienna to Italy would take nine hours! We were also delighted to find the metro system in Vienna to be MUCH easier than Paris. They actually used signs, and made announcements, and ran trains at frequent intervals. Best of all, the lines are colored coded, so the orange line had orange signs, turnstiles, cars, seats, etc. Hard to mess up here.
We were also pleased to actually find trash cans, as they apparently don’t exist in London or Paris. Being in Vienna was a little like being in IKEA– everything was efficient and brightly colored, with easy to follow directions. We settled in to a great hotel in Vienna, as Andy had wisely picked a business hotel for this point in the trip. We had planned on Vienna being a slower day to catch up on sleep and laundry, so it was nice to have a lovely hotel room to relax in. We slept. There was a TV, and I learned that German MTV is very scary. It was raining in Vienna, so we sloshed through puddles to an Australian Pub that Mieke had recommended. You were right, we were ready to hear people speaking English and to eat burgers. It ruled.
We then sloshed our way past a beautiful opera house (I tried to look at it, but there was too much rain to see through my glasses) and slept. And slept. And woke up in time to welcome the Pope to Vienna. We had accidentally timed our visit with his, so apparently the crowds, police, and media weren’t here just to see us. Can you imagine????
While we never saw him face to face, they had big screens in the platz that broadcasted his speeches from the various places he visited that day. It was cool. It was also very wet. We went to the Hofburg Palace to admire the rooms upon rooms full of the Hofburg china and gold, as well as their lavish living quarters. Then we ate Apple Strudel, which was fantastic, and I was so hopped up on caffeine from the Austrain coffee that we walked for quite awhile through the rainy streets of Vienna. Some of the other sights we wanted to check out were closed due to the Pope visiting, so we made a nice Vienna II list in case we come back someday.
We saw St. Stephen’s Cathedral, which is much darker in design than the optimistic cathedrals we saw in London and Paris. In general, the architecture, dress, and manner of Vienna gave a strong sense of Eastern Europe. The rain added some serious mood to it as well! We passed some great chocolate shops, and more stores along the lines of Prada, which made for fantastic people watching.
It was a rather short day, as the rain and the Pope prevented us from seeing much else. Thankfully, we had hoped for a much needed slow day, so we headed back to the hotel to glorious clean laundry, room service, and too much German TV. It was a good night. We slept. 
