Vienna

We're in Vienna! 

Our hotel is fantastic and right beside Vienna's version of 6 flags or Lake Winnie but with no admission fee. However it is apparently only for business people who rather dislike loud college students. We've gotten so many complaints and Jill and I were cornered in the elevator and yelled at for our group waking someone up in the middle of the night. 

Regardless, Vienna is clean and the weather is just like September in Georgia. We also found a Subway which is a cure-all. 

Venice/Padua was incredible. We saw a Vivaldi concert, toured museums, and explored the city. I still think Rome is my favorite city so far.  

My lack of musical knowledge is really showing these days. After Dr. Hadyn played a song in class I raised my hand and asked if it was a hymn, "I feel like I've heard it before."

Turns out it was Ode to Joy. 

Welcome to Roma!

Florence was fantastic. The city is beautiful, the people were friendly, and just about everything except our hotel was amazing. When we got there we explored the 2nd toilet? (bideau?) And tore off the "comforters" from our beds. They were so gross because we ended up in a smoking room somehow. 

We got to see the Duomo, Michelangelo's David, Donatello's David, the Birth of Venus, etc. We climbed to the top of the Duomo and got to see all of Florence. They had tons of tents selling strange knockoffs but we got some ties and scarves for literally nothing. 

One morning I convinced a group of about 12 that it would be a great idea to use the break between two of our museums to get breakfast at McDonalds...I had the perfect sausage biscuit dancing in my head like a sugar plum and thought our 9:45 break before breakfast would be the perfect time to make it a reality before they stopped serving at 10:30. Oh the naivete of the American college student. After our 20 min trek, we arrived to discover Big Macs and Croissants were just about the only thing on the menu. 

I felt so bad. Not only for my stomach but for everyone else I had bribed to come with taunts of, "DONT YOU WANT A MCGRIDDLE!?" 

Now we're in Rome and are staying in quite literally the ghetto. We bought pizza tonight and ate it on the side of the street. The only redeeming characteristic is free internet in our hotel. 

Jill and I took our laundry to a local laundrymat where little did we realize that the older man who owned it would personally be folding each and every one of our lacy panties. We're fairly creeped out. 

On the same note, back in Florence we went to a bar/club called Twice. The first night was really fun, just a lot of Oxford people and other young Americans. The next night however, they were apparently filming a Taken remake because the sketchy Italians were out in herds. It actually got pretty scary at one point because there were more girls than guys with us and the older locals kept grabbing us and trying to pull us away from our group. 

We had girls in the middle and the boys in a circle around us trying to keep them away from us and they would come up and literally break through the guys to try to dance with us, pull us away, etc. 

Austria!

I never realized how beautiful Austria is! Today is a national german holiday so everything was closed. We ended up taking about an hour busride out to Salzberg, Austria and doing the sound of music tour. It was absolutely breath-taking. I think we saw the museum/tour that mom mentioned Angela and Tom doing, the one with the surpise, secret fountains. Salzberg is in a valley surrounded by gigantic mountains with snow on the peaks. We got to see nearly all the places they filmed for the movie and we took another hour busride to see the church from the marriage scene. There were huge crystal clear glacier lakes that apparently are so clean you can drink from them.

Tomorrow we have several museums and a concentration camp on the agenda and then Wednesday we leave for Florence!