Day 18: Budapest -> Vienna - Dec 7, 2019

The Trip from Budapest to Vienna

We left Budapest early because Rose wasn’t feeling up to doing any of the escape rooms I had booked.  Unlike Brussels where poor Rose had to endure an escape room while sick and exhausted, we weren't going to lose any money since the places hadn't required prepaying (I did call and cancel though.) 

That gave us the flexibility to take an earlier train.  Changing our reservation was a big pain in the neck and we were told that we had to just find some seats because they couldn't book any at such short notice.  They told us we could get on the train, but would probably have to sit in the dining car.  The dining car was completely full, so we walked down the train until we found this car which only had one other guy (who eventually got off) because no one had reserved seats in it.  It felt was a personal train car from Budapest and had the most AMAZING bathroom!

Arriving in Vienna

My best friend Peter and his wife Hanni picked us up from the train station in Vienna and drove us to their house. Here are a couple of pics:

Down Memory Lane

After a wonderful meal that Hanni cooked, we headed downtown to go on a ghost tour.  It was really, really lame and we ditched it so became the REAL ghosts of the tour.  We then walked to the center of Vienna where there were tons of tourists.  Everything was decorated for Christmas.

We visited the building where I first lived when I came to Vienna right around the corner from one of the main streets (the Graben.) 

My grandmother was the superintendent of the building.  This brought back a lot of memories of 12 year old me running around the streets of Vienna pretty much unsupervised but also without other little hoodlums like myself, since not very many kids lived in the inner city. These streets were my playground and I explored everywhere I could get in free (like the Japanese Cultural Place which no longer exists and where they would patiently teach me how to make the stork or the frog with Origami.)