Vienna, Two New Friends and a Free Eye Exam

On Tuesday morning I got up early (by my standards) and headed to the bus station to head to Vienna, Austria. Sadly, the bus was an hour late, but no harm not foul. I enjoyed a calm 3 hour ride to Vienna. Now, the odd thing is the drive looks almost exactly like driving through Kansas. It was just agriculture all the way with some occasional large hills. The only real difference was wind farms EVERYWHERE. I mean as far as the eye can see in all directions. Now, if you drive down I-70 these days, you will some some wind turbines going, but not like this. And honestly, I like it. People complain they are an eyesore, but there is something really cool about seeing them all over the place. It is just flat country, not really a site worthy of a trip to see anyway, this is at least adds some practicality and excitement to the view.

I finally get in around 1pm to Vienna. Now, I know roughly I am on one side of the city and need to get to the other for my hostel. This is always the fun part of visiting a new city, figuring out how it works. I go to the metro right away, figure out the rough plan for the system and then decide what metros I need to hop on and off of and where to get to my desired location. After about 20-minutes a good guessing I arrive at my hostel.

This time around I have gone with the cheap option, a 10-person room. Turns out alright. You just have to be prepared to be woken up by noise a little at night and in the morning, but worth the savings. People in hostels are pretty courteous of other travelers when people are sleeping.

This hostel, unlike my others, is pretty awesome. Good sized, had great reviews, has a kitchen, laundry room and full bar. I drop my stuff off, scope out the place and head into the city to wander.

I went into the central downtown area and walked around for awhile seeing the main sites. The beautiful St. Stephens Cathedral, the Parliament building designed after the temple of Athena, some awesome looking museums and some amazing parks. This is my first solo travel and I end up feeling a little lonely. Things are less exciting by your self, but still really cool.

As evening rolls in I go down to the bar for "happy hour" which is a pretty good deal. 2 Euros for a liter of good beer. I don't like beer back in the states, but I do like beer in Europe so far. Go figure. Feeling kind of lonely, I realize I just need to start striking up conversations with out guests and accept I will strike out some and win other times.

I sit next to two ladies (look around my age) who are speaking English with a native tone and strike up a conversation. We start chit chatting about where we have been, seen, etc. One, Alison, is from Ohio but lives in NYC and the other, Audrey, is from Emerton, Canada. I find out that they are both optometrists and met in school and stay in touch. They just went to Octoberfest, then onto Vienna, Buchurist and then Budapest and home.

Somewhere in our conversation I end up asking eye questions. Now, I have never seen an eye doctor in my life. My vision is great and never had a need, so I start firing away and they have a blast with it. They are lucky people who enjoy their work. I turn into research for them, as I explain about having migraines with visual auras and how it affects my sight, etc. I let them know they can now right this trip off as a business expense with my exam.

After a while more of chatting about our backgrounds they eventually ask me my plans for the next day (don't have any) and invite me to join them in renting bikes and riding around the city seeing the typical tourist sights. Happy to not go solo, I try to cooly accept, but I probably sounded like a kid being asked if he wants to open Christmas presents early. Not to mention, from the hour or so of chatting I can tell both Alison and Audrey are about as cool as they come. Both have great senses of humor, intelligent and just excited about life. I think its a friendship that will last.

We eventually ditch the bar for food. The liquid diet of beer is starting to catch up to all of us. We go across the street to a typical Austrian restaurant and decide to try some Austrian delicacies. I order the Weiner Snitchel (I spelled that wrong for sure). We also decide to try a European thing, beer mixed with coke. Thinking it is going to be nasty, I am quite surprised. It tasted pretty good. The first sip was weird, but each one got better. It tasted somewhere in-between beer and flat coke, which sounds bad, but really isn't.

After our joyous dinner, we get some austrian pastries up the street and call it a night. The plan is to meet up with my new friends - well, my new doctors, as I keep referring to them as - at 10am the next day for some biking. I walk away thinking I have met some really cool people and will enjoy sight seeing tomorrow. I have a small twinge of fear that maybe they are being polite and I will show up at 10am tomorrow to disappointed, but I highly doubt it as I got a good vibe from both of my two new doctors.