Vienna and the Belvedere

In order to not crash my computer while trying to upload a thousand pictures in one post, I'm gonna split up my fall break posts a little bit. Bite-size, if you will.

Savannah and I traveled together for the first part of break. After an overnight train ride from Florence to Vienna (during which we struggled to hold an intelligible conversation with the rest of the Italians in our car, who spoke zero English but were curious about American culture), we took a much shorter train to the Belvedere art museum, which used to be a palace, in case you couldn't tell from looking at it.

These are the gardens behind the palace. From the windows on the upper floors, it was easier to see that the greenery is cut into swirling patterns, but I didn't want to get out my camera up there for fear of it being confiscated by the guards or something.

I did sneak a quick picture of the atrium ceiling, however. Mostly for the chandeliers.

Also, in the atrium, they had these exercise balls inside velvet slipcovers for people to sit on. I want some of these in my house.

The staircase at the back of the building. Aaaah gorgeous.

Another sneaky picture. We couldn't resist.

We saw some amazing art in there, which we were not allowed to photograph, but they had a lot of fabulous Klimt paintings, whose name I only knew because he used to date Mahler's wife. Thank you, music history research paper. We wandered through the museum for a few hours, then spent the remainder of our time in Vienna strolling around this little park that was tucked in beside the Belvedere complex. The weather was actually almost chilly, which was incredibly refreshing after weeks of 80 degrees and muggy and mosquitoes in Florence.

Then we had to get back on a train for another five hours to go to Prague! It was quite the adventure arriving when most of the train station was closed, trying to figure out how to get and use the Czeck currency (it's crowns, or coruna, and the exchange rate is like 21 crowns = one US dollar), and finding our way to our hostel, Mosaic House. We made it, with the help of some friendly American students who were kind enough to look up the location of the hostel on their smartphones for us. We found the place and checked in without any further difficulties. There were two other people's stuff in our four-person room, but the actual people were nowhere to be seen, so we decided to go to bed and meet them in the morning.

I'll end here for now. Next time, stay tuned for our adventures in Prague!

- Kasha