First Days in Europe

Guten Tag!

We arrived safe and sound with a few uneventful flights and are now in Vienna, Austria and are heading to Budapest, Hungary in the morning.

Ryan and I met in Amsterdam and got to Munich around 11AM, got our car, a nice little Kia six speed, and went to our hotel. We tried to check in but we were early so we grabbed a bite to eat and some beer to kill some time. I fully immersed Ryan into unfamiliarity as soon as I could by choosing a tiny hole in the wall bar where no English was spoken. I ordered us a few beers and we tried to decipher the menu, and eventually order. The food was good, I had some hot dog like sausages and Ry had a currywurst. We went back to the hotel and tried to check in again, and they couldn't find our reservation. That was because there were two hotels of the same name and we were at the other one. Luckily, the other hotel was only a mile or so away, and we checked in and took about a 4 hour nap, as neither of us really slept on the plane.

After waking up from our hard earned naps, we walked around our neighborhood, which was near the river that runs through Munich, which at this time the name escapes me. We walked along the river and then found a traditional Beer hall to dine at, called Wirthaus or something like that. I had some pork chops and a potato dumpling, which was delicious, and Ry had some Knodel, or dumplings, which were also very good. All in all, a pretty good first day.

We both woke up on Sunday at about 6, got ready, ate a large breakfast, and hit the road to Vienna. We decided to take the scenic route and avoid tollways so it took us about 4 and a half hours to get there, although the GPS told us it would take 6 and a half. Our first 70 miles or so in Germany were on the highway, also called the Autobahn :) Since I was driving, I decided to try and keep up with traffic a little bit, but even at 160 km/h people were still flying by us, so I kept it at a cool 140 km/h... For those who want to know how fast that is, you can do the math, since I don't want my mother to worry about it. haha. After we got off the highway, we went through a lot of small and beautiful towns in the rolling hills. We saw some mountains in the distance but they were further to the south and we should drive through them on our way back through Austria in a couple days.

Vienna is a really cool city with so much interesting history. We walked around in the rain yesterday to a large Versailles like complex called Belvedere. They had an art museum in one of the buildings and we saw some cool paintings and sculptures. This place was about 1/50 the size of Versailles and another place here that we saw called Schonnbrunn, but it was still pretty cool. We also went to a cool church, called Kritzkirche I think. We took a lift up to the dome and then some stairs to the very top of the dome and saw a panoramic of the city, which helped us to orient ourselves a little better.

Today, we saw the palace of the Habsburgs, the royal family that ruled for centuries, the natural history museum, a bunch of churches and other places of interest. Later we are going to walk around some markets by our hotel and go to a music museum. It was cloudy this morning but luckily it didn't rain much and eventually cleared up. It's pretty cool here, probably in the 60s.

Tomorrow we are off to Budapest and I hope to update y'all further in a few days. I am getting excited to see the mountains in Austria and to get back to Georgia.

I will post some pictures in the near future.

Auf Weidersehen!

Reed

ps. Apparently my spellcheck for this is in German so forgive any spelling errors :)