Day 155: Inner Stadt

I only had two full days in Vienna, so I was pretty motivated to see as much as I could. I took the metro back to Museumsquartier Station, which was just about as far as I had gone yesterday. I first checked the park for my lost key card, with no success. I then explored a building complex and plaza known as Heldenplatz.

This is where the VIPs of yestercentury would spend their days. There is an ancient instrument musuem and the old court library in the area, but today happened to be one of the five or so days a year they are closed, so I bookmarked them for tomorrow.

A smaller square near the main plaza

From Heldenplatz I walked into Volksgarten, an extremely pleasent garden area with fountains, statues, and hundreds of rose plants.

Needless to say, it's a great place to just be -- smelling the scents and sitting in the shade by a fountain. 

One fountain shoots out of a fish's mouth, another shoots out of a man's mouth

Inside the above building is this sculpture by a contemporary American sculptor

Tanning with a view

From Volksgarten I stumbled into the University of Vienna, which seems to be located entirely in a single, large building that takes up a square city block. I thought there would be a cool reading room inside, but most of the doors were closed and everything was labeled in German so I was too afraid to try the door handles.

After stopping at a cafe closer towards the center of the city, I found St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Surprisingly, there is a free entrance area that allows you to see most of the interior of the church. Throughout the 20th century, the facade of the cathedral became increasingly blackened by the pollution from nearby factories and vehicles. Some sections have yet to be cleaned. The look is not very flattering.

I hopped on the metro for a stop to Stadtpark. North of the park there is the Museum of Applied Arts which usually has a 10 Euro cover charge, but specifically on Tuesdays, from 6-10pm it is free. It was only 4pm at that point, so I went back to the hostel to make myself nuttella and jelly sandwiches for dinner and to rest. At 7pm I took the metro back to the museum.

Among a lot of old furniture and ceramics, the museum has a lot of items that would probably fall into the industrial design genre. Things like book covers, posters, rugs, household tools, etc. I thought they had some exhibits on the "singularity", which I had seen in one of their brochures and had been my primary motivating reason to come back, but they were nowhere to be found. 

Looking up the central staircase at the musuem

I left around 9pm and went back to the hostel for the night.

Day 154: To Vienna

My bus to Vienna left just before noon, so after checking out of Unity Hostel one last time I walked with a Swedish girl to the metro (she was going the same direction as me, but to the airport). The bus arrived 20 minutes late, but I wasn't in a rush. The first thing you notice upon entering Austria is the massive wind farm that surrounds you. Towering windmills stretch on in every direction for as far as the eye can see. It makes you wonder how anyone could think windmills are ugly.

Once we arrived at Erdberg Station in Vienna 2.5 hours later, I bought a Mon-Fri metro pass for 16.8 euros and took the metro about 10 stations to within a 10-minute walk of my hostel.

Google Maps is no help in this respect, because for some reason it has yet to parse the Vienna metro routes, or the company in charge of the metro hasn't made the data accessible online. After the usual check-in formalities I had to do my laundry before going out. I didn't want to have it done at Unity Hostel in Budapest because they charge 8 Euros to wash, dry, and fold your clothes for you. It turned out that the price of laundry here was 7 euros but you had to do it yourself, which just about entirely obviated my reasoning. After taking care of my laundry, I walked down the main pedestrian boulevard toward old town Vienna around 8pm. A trio of musicians were performing near the MuseumsQuartier and I stopped to listen. 

A little further downtown there is another impressive (but apparently incomplete) building and an adjacent park, where I flopped down on the grass to soak up the evening ambiance with the numerous other groups that were already there.

Once back at the hostel I realized that my key card had slipped out of my pocket at some point and I had to pay 5 euros for another one. I slept around 12.

Day 153: Rudas Baths

Around noon I went with Tash and Kade to Rudas Baths, another Turkish Spa in Budapest.

I'm happy to report that my experience at the baths this time was overwhelmingly positive. Rudas is rather traditional, in that it is non co-ed during the week, but, being Sunday, all three of us were able to go. The locker rooms are really neat because instead of a locker, each person has their own "cabin", which is just a small changing room where you also lock your stuff after you are done.

If you only pay for the thermal baths as we did, Rudas has one large Turkish bath, five smaller pools, and wet and dry saunas. The Turkish bath is about 36 degrees, and the other baths range from 16 to 42 degrees. The dry sauna gets up to about 80 degrees (yes, Celsius). The wet sauna feels even more intense from inside, but is probably only 50-60 degrees. After three hours, I felt so relaxed that it felt as if gravity had gotten stronger while we were bathing.

After the baths we were pretty hungry so we stopped at a cafe just across the bridge before hiking the remaining 20 minutes to a sushi place only two doors down from my hostel. Tash and Kade were heading to Poland tomorrow, whereas I would be going to Vienna, but we would be seeing each other again a week from now in Prague so our adieus were heartfelt, but not overly sorrowful.

At the hostel I joined some others watching Rick and Morty in the common room (at this point I'm thinking 'how much better can this day get?'), before joining a group of Canadians and Israelis going out for dinner. We stopped at a Caribbean place and afterwards went to a beer garden for drinks. At this point our group splintered off and the Canadians and I bounced around a few pubs, but not finding much going on at any of them, returned to the hostel around 11pm.

Day 152: Back to Budapest

My flight left at 5 in the evening, so I had plenty of time to prepare myself for the day. I was able to take the metro all the way to the airport, after a transfer, but, in one final cash grab by the city, it's necessary to buy a special, 5 euro airport ticket before exiting the station for the terminal.

After a 2.5 hour flight, we landed in Budapest around 8pm. From the airport I took the 200E bus to the nearest metro station, from where I was able to ride into the center of town, arriving back at Unity Hostel around 9:30pm.

The two kiwis -- Tash and Kade -- were still in Budapest, so I met up with them at Kuplung for some drinks.

Around midnight we called it quits and returned to our respective hostels (they had since moved to a different hostel, which they regretted terribly!).

Day 151: Last Day in Barcelona

When I woke up I discovered that my shoes and last remaining pair of clean socks had been rained on during the night (I had left them on the windowsill to air out), so I was stuck at the hostel for the next few hours while they dried out in the sun. I didn't mind too much because walking up and down the 161 steps to and from the hostel had really caught up to me, and I was sore.

Around 8pm I decided to walk up to the bunkers to get a good look at Barcelona one last time. Being a Friday evening, there were innumerable groups of young'ins that had had the same idea as myself, plus alcohol. For a moment, I reflected on how much better my Barcelona experience could have been had I stayed at a proper, social hostel.

After returning to the hostel

In the evening, the Ecuadorian girl (Jerry's friend) that had flaked on me at the club a few days earlier texted me asking if I wanted to get some beers downtown. This time I was actually able to meet up with her and, along with her Moroccan friend, went to a bar called La Oveja Negra. 

It was supposedly a "very spanish" pub, but halfway through our drinks chants of "USA! USA!" broke out at one of the tables, quickly followed by "España! España!" at two or three others.

It was a fun night out, and I made it back to the hostel around 1am.