Today is our last day in Vienna! We took the beginning of the morning to rest up and pack up. We the went off to meet with Sarah! She took us around the first district. I can also proudly day that I had Manner Wafer. They literally have any flavour you could imagine and all possibilities of merchandise; that’s right from bikinis to even baby onsies! We went inside the St Stephan Church which we somehow managed to miss when we went sightseeing before. What was really interesting is that placed in the outside church wall were metal measurements. Apparently these were used back in the day so peasants could measure goods and not be cheated by the merchants. One was to to measure the length of fabric, and size of bread. If a merchant was found guilty of ripping off a customer they were caged and dunked into the river! We then went through the high end shopping district working our way to the Jewish Quarter!? In the open square there was a monument shaped as a book store in remembrance of the books burned and Jewish whole were killed during the Nazi regime. We then went inside an office to see the coolest elevator I have ever seen! It was an old wooden one where you had to jump into it to get inside. When we rode it down to the bottom the axis rotated it to go back up, I have never seen anything like it before! Afterwards we walked to one of the summer palaces known as the Hofburg Palace. Apparently the royal family felt too isolated from the city in their primary castle and as a result they built this one, which is now used as the Parliament headquarters. We made our way to an ice team store to have a cone and then say our goodbyes.
Andrea and I then went off to meet Charlotte at the Belvedere. The royal family must have loved having castles, as the art gallery was a former palace. Now I I’ll admit I don’t know much to anything about art yet it still astonishes me how talented artists are. It’s now a surprise to anyone that I can’t even draw stick men :) Another interesting thing about the Belvedere was that they had a sketch of what the room looked like and what’s its purpose was when the royal family inhabited it. Exuberance can’t explain how they must have lived. For example, they had a marble cabinet room, a two story chapel and a minimum of three drawing rooms. Afterwards we then explored the gardens and then made our way to meet Chris for coffee. Well I had Apple strudel, and it was delicious :) Chris was one of Andreas grade seven classmates, a fellow UBC student and just happened to be in exchange in Vienna: such a small world! We then headed back to Charlottes to make a quick dinner and headed off to the train station to go to Venice.Hopefully third time is the charm with our overnight trains, especially since this is our last overnight train during our trip!