Day 4 - Salzburg to Vienna



View out our window of Stephansplatz

Dec 17th - Well, apparently the temperature dropped sometime overnight as we woke up to everything covered in snow, and flurries still floating down. Time to get packed up, and make way to the train station for the 3 hour ride to Vienna (Wien). It was another enjoyable train ride, with the first portion giving us views of pretty, snow-covered mountains & towns but the snow had disappeared by the time we arrived in Vienna. A quick U-ride (underground) dumped us at Stephansplatz square, where we quickly found our accommodations for the next 3 nights. WOW! Rob earns big points for finding this place! We're in an apartment rental on the 7th floor of a building that overlooks Stephansplatz square which is where the massive St. Stephen's Cathederal is located. It is an impressive piece of archetecture!

   

St. Stephen's Cathederal

After a quick drop of the bags, we headed out to explore the immediate surroundings on foot...in the rain (at times, another sideways, rainy kind of day). We wandered up the main drag from the cathederal - it's a wide, long pedestian-way lined both sides with store after store - and the streets were streaming with massive crowds of people. Our first impressions...this city is huge and busy! As it started to get dark and the Christmas lights came alive...the light spectacular was jaw dropping. Every streeet seems to have it's own theme of lighting, and it's like nothing I've ever seen before. The only thing I could think that comes close to this is being in Times Square. There's a few pics here, but they really don'd do it justice. I can't imagine the effort it takes to decorate this city - it's making me feel lazy for not getting out a single decoration before leaving on vacation. Come to think of it, I might still have a Halloween decoration still up in the house somewhere :)



 



Last stop for the night was a brew pub not far from our apartment that we happened to find on TripAdvisor while walking around - having a mobile device while on the go has definitely proving to be handy on this trip!. The place is called 1516 (calling all beer-geeks...what is the significance of that name?), and when we walked in felt like we stepped into a pub back home. A quasi-sports-american themed place, they had a small Toronto Maple Leafs banner behind the bar...Rob thought it was a bad idea to go in when he saw that, but he threw caution to the wind. Then we really started scratching our heads when we saw Victory Hop Devil on the board...wha?? When Rob inquired, the waitress told us that all the beers are brewed on premise, but that some of the recipes are not originally theirs. We were skeptical about that, but ordered some other beers on the menu...all were very good (the double IPA wasn't quite what we expected for a double IPA, but was tasty). After some google searching, we found some info that apparently the owner of 1516 met & became friends with the one of the founders of Victory at a conference, and that is how they have come to brew a version here in Austria. But we will have to try it another time, as it was time to call it a night!



Beers for the day: Edelweisse Wiessbier, 1516 Blond 'lager', 1516 Eejit's Oatmeal Stout, 1516 Savinjski Imperial IPA, 1516 Equatorial Pale Ale, Ottakringer Dunkle, Ottakringer Helles