The (true) home of the croissant.

Vienna is large.  I suppose it might seem more so because we've just come from little places like Ljubljana and Pula, but it is a place of wide streets and long roads.  Which for people who like to walk every where is a bit annoying.  The time spent away in other places though has allowed space to be amazed at buildings all over again.  We walked out of the metro station and stumbled, a little accidently, upon the parliament building.  It was an oh wow moment.  It faded quite a bit fairly quickly though.  Theres a lot of big impressive, statue covered buildings around here.   You can defintely see evidence of it being the home of the Habsburg empire.  We wandered through the museumsquartier, and the buildings around there, and then strolled in the rough direction of St Stephen's Cathedral.   If you ever come to Vienna I strongly recommend you visit the cathedral.  It's free to just wander through the cathedral, you do have to pay to go into the Catacombs or the tower though.  The cathedral itself is enough though.  It has large stained glass windows and they light up the pillars that run through the middle of the church with interesting patterns.  It looks amazing.  (Though I did notice part of the effect was fake as they had lights up - to assist when it wasn't quite sunny enough to light up the windows enough.)

After that we meandered down in the direction of the Belvedere next.  Stopping to eat lunch in a shady spot on the way.  The Belvedere is split into two museums in two buildings, we just went to the upper building, where the main museum/gallery is.  It was well worth the visit.  The art covered a huge range of time and styles.  It included 'The Kiss' by Gustav Klimit, who I'm going to admit - I'd never heard of before.  It also included paintings by my favourite pervert Mr Egon Schiele, which I particularly enjoyed as I now know quite a bit about him.  The museum was housed in the Belvedere palace, so it also included small descriptions about the rooms and what they had been used for and how they would have looked originally, or which ones where still mostly in the original condition.  You also got great views of the gardens and of the city from the windows in the upper floors.

That about covers our day, except for our short stop in the botanical gardens, which was cut very short by the large misquitos who decided to stop by.  We've changed rooms, so we're now in a room in a different building, which isn't so bad.  We have a guest kitchen in this building and wifi so its fine.  Once again though we'll have to pack up our stuff and move it to the luggage room so we can check out and then check back in again in the afternoon.  And we'll have to make our beds once again tomorrow.  Thats particularly annoying, remaking your bed every day.  Looking forward to not having to do that when I get home.