Easter Weekend - part 1 of 2

This past weekend was Easter weekend for those of you who missed the memo.  At PUMA that means a 4 day weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday).  Karen and I grabbed the chance to see two lovely cities while visiting a retired intern from days gone by.  We started off in Vienna, Austria.

We arrived Friday afternoon and checked in at the hostel.  My first experience in a dorm setting (6 people to a room).  We then made our way to the city center for a look around.  We quickly found these brilliant traffic lights. 

 Nice gardens, parliament, the city hall, and an Easter market with loads of painted eggs, some very ornate and others simple, but all real.  We split a giant apple cinnamon frosted pretzel.  We made our way to another market and tried Langos, this fried bread bigger than your face, coated in butter and garlic salt.  So delicious, and made us both feel rather bad upon finishing... We had just finished talking about our families’ heart attack histories.  I was sure I was going to have my first heart attack right there.

It seems everyone in Austria likes Mozart since he is from there.  We saw one guy dressed as Mozart with PUMA shoes.  I did take a picture, but am not bothering to post it. 

We stumbled across this cool “Explosion” on the south side of town.  I think it was supposed to be a frozen shock wave, milliseconds after some sort of bang.

After collecting ourselves at the hostel briefly we set out again to find some Sachertorte, a chocolate cake with an apricot layer in the middle and a special blend of chocolates from various manufacturers who produce chocolate solely for that purpose.  On our way we swung by the Nike store, because their shoes are absolutely amazing.  I love the new NikeFree 4.0.

After a short night’s sleep we both got up around 6 (don’t ask me why, it just happened).  Karen went for a long run, which I had to skip out on because of injury before we headed away from the city to see Castle Schönbrunn.  Absolutely HUGE building and property.  It included a labyrinth with games throughout it that included poles to climb, bells to ring with your feet, and crazy mirrors.  It made for a fun morning.

 Lunch was at a ridiculously large market.  Wiener (Viennese) Schnitzel from veal and Almdudler (served in CocaCola cups?), a drink like ice tea that tastes like Litchi.

Clock museum in the afternoon was full of fun little treasures.  Karen got in trouble for touching the clocks.

 The main event came that evening.  We had read that we could get standing room tickets at the Opera for 3€ so we lined up and got some.  “L’Eliser d’Amore”  (The Love Potion) was playing.  It had quite the shallow story line, but the opera experience was a fun one.  They have this crazy system for the standing room section that enforced by the staff.  Once you have your spot, you mark it with a scarf and then it is reserved for you.  You can’t mark it with a jacket, or a bag, only a scarf.  The guys next to us didn’t have scarves so they made the pages from the program into a scarf to draper over their spot.  Impressive.  That was the program for Vienna.  Stay tuned for the second half of the weekend in Graz in which we meet Markus and have even more fun.