Always an Adventure

Our trip to Vienna was a welcome respite from Modra, but Amy and I soon tired of the summer holiday crowds. We had decided to visit the Sisi Museum and the Imperial Rooms in one of the Hapsburg museums, but had not realized that it would be so crowded inside. At one point, we found ourselves crushed between tourists in a narrow hallway with no ventilation, and with no one willing to yield to let us pass by.

We had just completed walking through the rooms that seemed to feature every dinner setting ever purchased in Austria from time immemorial. And one lesson learned: audio guides are a hazard to those without them. Believe you me, we found ourselves the victim of many a protruding elbow as we made our way through the rows and rows of collections. I think every emperor who existed granted some sort of dinnerware to Austria, but, really, how many sets of dinnerware can you admire? They all start to look alike after awhile.

And, we probably would have enjoyed the Imperial Rooms more had we not found ourselves trapped in narrow hallways at the mercy of the speed of the tour guide in the room. We might even have had some compassion for poor Elizabeth who was featured as the forlorn Empress from Bavaria throughout all of the rooms. But I'll admit that it was a bit difficult to sympathize with someone who obviously lived in the lap of luxury and was upset that she couldn't ride her horse alone after her marriage to Ferdinand. I suppose that there are always two sides to a story, but one would think that if one was going to devote an entire museum wing to an Empress, that she would have been reflected in a more positive light, rather than as the constant complainer.

After returning to our room on Saturday night and thoroughly enjoying the solitude, we had decided to take the metro to Stephanplatz and attend mass at St. Stephen's Church in the middle of the square. We knew that we could forget a peaceful walk to the church when we entered the plaza from the metro and immediately spotted 4 tour guides with numbered signs in their hands. 

We somehow managed to force our way into the church, which was filled with tourists who weren't there for the service. One apparently has to pay 4 euro to see the church during non-service hours, but it is free for the taking during Mass times. So, while the priest is saying mass on the altar, scores of people are shuffling through the back of the church to take a peek at the interior. Luckily, the church is long enough that all of this commotion is not that noticeable during the service for those of us in the front pews. 

After Mass, Amy and I felt like we really had had enough of the pushy crowds, so we decided to make our way to the bus station. We easily located the tram stop for our return trip with nearly an hour to spare, much to our relief!

After a couple of stops, it became obvious that we were not following the route on the metro map that we had managed to get at the hotel, and we began to worry. We weren't sure what to do , when suddenly an older man jumped up and started flinging his hands around. It was obvious that the tram driver had taken some sort of detour. Apparently one of the overhead wires has broken and he was forced to take the tram the long way around the city. Since we didn't understand any German, you can only imagine our concern when time kept slipping away to the scheduled departure from Vienna to Bratislava. .

Our concern must have been obvious, because another old man next to me began to tell me some sort of story in German while moving his hands around. I held up the map and showed our destination to a man sitting behind me, and he gestured that I should not be concerned because he was also going to this bus station. He didn't speak English, but his facial expression was enough to ease my fears. Except that he didn't know that we had planned to catch the 1:00 bus back to Bratislava, and the time was getting extremely close.

We finally reached our destination with only a couple of minutes to spare. We decided to take the elevator to save time to the pass-through which is located underground, and we were just hitting the down button when an Indian family decided that they would join us. So we waited while the family, complete with Grandma and a baby in a carriage, all tried to squeeze into the elevator with us. Really, we could have been down the stairs by this point, but we were squashed against the back of the elevator, so there wasn't any escaping.

But, as luck would have us, the doors behind us opened on the ground floor, and we dashed up several sets of stairs, and over to the bus, just as it was arriving. I handed the man my ticket, and he tgestured to me that it needed to be stamped in the office. Something that was NOT mentioned to us, by the way, when we purchased the tickets.

So, we rushed over to the little office, where a very kind man assisted us by stamping the tickets, then we ran back to the bus, boarded, and just about collapsed into our seats.

We arrived in Bratislava just fine, and managed to make our connection to Modra-Harmonia with out any incident. We even walked into town for dinner, back to the little restaurant that serves fabulous Bryndza halusky and pirohy.

And I didn't even complain when I ordered the 'jeden' serving of Cervene vina and the waitress brought the 'dva'. She must have somehow known that I needed the double serving!

(Wine is ordered by volume here. Jeden means 1 in Slovak, and dva means 2, so I had a double serving of Red wine...and it was great!)