"I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen..."

After our time in Berlin and Prague we arrived in Vienna.  There was something about Vienna I really liked and found much different than the last two cities.  The first day we were there it was cold and cloudy so we took it easy and looked for some indoors things to fill our time.  We set off in the city and headed for the Sigmund Freud museum.  I think I was most excited for this being a psychology major, so I was looking forward to whatever we would see.  My friends had initially thought that the museum was going to be a display of his work, experiments, and theories, instead it was where Freud used to live and had his office and held appointments with patients.  My friends were slightly disappointed with this discovery but I thought it was really interesting.  There is something about being in a room where so much history has taken place that seems to make you feel enlightened and privileged.

We all seemed to be out of it and decided to save the big stuff for the following day and just take it easy.  We spent the remainder of the day walking around and spending some time in a quaint little coffee shop where we ate apple strudel and chatted for a while planning for the next day.  Afterwards we went back to our hostel and relaxed for a bit.  I was still feeling under the weather so while my friends went out to dinner I stayed in to rest hoping to gather some energy for the next day.

We got an early start the following morning and after breakfast we took the metro to the Schonbrunn Palace.  It was absolutely massive and took up most of our day.  There were over 1000 rooms inside of the palace, however because it was such a beautiful day outside we decided to skip the inside tour of the palace and stick all it had to offer in the gardens which included a palm house, botanic garden, desert house, a zoo, a maze, the great parterre, and so much more. We spent hours walking around the gardens and spent a decent amount of time in the zoo as I could barely pull my friends away from all of the animals. 

After hours of walking around my friends were ready to leave but there was one last thing I really wanted to see, the great parterre.  It looked beautiful on the map but the downside was that it was up a steep hill, which my friends did not want to go up.  They were patient enough to let me go up and see it before we left while they waited at the bottom and rested their feet.  It was a little hike up but I was so happy that I did it.  At the top of the hill was a beautiful view of the palace and all of Vienna in the distance.  I climbed up the top of the great parterre and could see the mountains in the distance, it was the most beautiful view I had seen my whole stay in Vienna.

That evening we went out to dinner and took one more trip to the church, Karlskirche.  We sat on the steps for about an hour or so as the sun went down and watched the lights of the church slowly come on as we chatted and took pictures.  It was a great evening with my friends and I could not have imagined a better way to bring our trip to Vienna to an end than relaxing on the steps with this gorgeous church standing before us.  I felt nothing but gratitude for our trip in that moment.