Vienna - Town of Amusement park !

As you head into Vienna, one of the first things we noticed is that it seemed like a very, very large city. I haven’t looked at the figures and sizes, but it felt larger than Berlin, which is already larger than Paris. Still, for all that, I wasn’t a big fan of Vienna.

We only had two nights, and most of our first day was spent just getting there, so we only really had one actual day to see things. So we walked around the old town, looking at all the buildings and observing what was going on around us. This included a little green park near the main town hall and museum section. While still big and grand, these buildings didn’t have the same sort of in-your-face boldness and strength that alot of the German buildings have.

After all the usual sights, we headed over to Prater. This is a large, open air amusement park, easily reachable via public transport if you’re so inclined. It has plenty of different rides and is free to get in. There’s usually 2 or 3 variants of any given ride, and most of them didn’t seem to cost any more than 4EUR per go, which was pretty reasonable value.

Among the rides we chose to do was an “Arctic Experience” – sort of like a ghost train, but inside a crafted Iceberg, with a laser-pointer camera, you had to aim at little targets to make animatronic creatures do things (like have sex. Yes. Really.) After that, we went on one of the crazy houses, where the floor moves in different ways, and you go through optic illusion tunnels, things like that. Was a good chuckle, and probably longer than the other ride, cause we just took our time. We also did a Vampire “5D” movie thing, that was really just a 3-D movie, with movement and squirting of some ‘blood’ – still, it went for almost 15 minutes.

Outside of the city a little bit is Schloss Schonbrunn. This includes huge open parkland area with a maze and fountains, as well as the palace building. To just walk around in the gardens is free, and the maze was 2.90EUR per person, but considering there was 3 mazes, was well worth the money. One of them had all sorts of other amusement things in them, like a platform you jumped on to make water spurt out of a fountain, and a set of metal plates you could dance on to make musical sounds, things that make adults act like kids. You know what I mean :P