We slept for a few hours before getting up and checking out of the hotel. Before I tell you about our next experience you have to know a bit of what we did each night at the hotel. Rachel brought her computer and downloaded Schindler’s List. For those of you who haven’t seen this movie is based on the story of a single man who saved hundreds of Jew’s during World War 2. The movie is also 3 hours long but for those who haven’t seen it I would highly recommend it. This movie helped us set the tone for the upcoming day. We spent the day visiting the Dachau concentration camp.
It was a great experience. The camp had been prettied up because the survivors wanted it to be more of an educational experience. There were memorials placed all throughout the camp and many graphic pictures that had a sombering effect. After we left the concentration camp we grabbed our luggage from the hotel and headed to Vienna.
We arrived in Vienna later that night. We were exhausted from the day’s adventures so we grabbed a bite to eat and checked into our hostel. The next day we woke up a little bit later and had breakfast at the hostel. We decided to take it slow for the day and visited some amazing palaces and castles in Vienna.
We even got to see the Austrian crown jewel collection. The jewels were spectacular and there were tons of them. The day was mostly spent walking lazily around the city and just feeling the vibe of everything. Vienna reminded me a lot of Austin to put it in Texas terms. There were quite a few hippies and it was very laid back and relaxed. No one seemed stressed or in a hurry.
The next day was quite an experience for us. Most of you are probably going to wonder why we did this but there is really no way to explain how great it was. On this day we had what we called an American day. We started out the morning going to a huge open market that Rachel said reminded her of Pike’s Place in Seattle. There were endless varieties of fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and all sorts of treats. We stopped at a teashop and tried some excellent teas. Rachel bought a leaf tea that is flavored like Pina Colada and Cody got one that the lady let us try and that we really liked. It smells amazing! After the market we decided we were going to see the Ferris wheel that the city is so proud of. When we got there we found to our great surprise that the Ferris wheel was in the middle of a theme park. So Cody and Rachel rode a roller coaster ride and afterwards we got cotton candy.
We did all this just before the highlight of the day. We went to see a movie! We saw The Reader (in English) and it was actually very good. For those of you who don’t know the three of us have a tradition of going to the dollar movie every Tuesday night so this semester has been particularly hard because we have not been able to see a movie. After our movie we went to KFC and had fried chicken before catching a night train back to Paderno.
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