La Vie en France: Vienna, Austria

Playing on the playground in Vienna

This is for you Dad.

So, I don't even know where to start! I had a two week vacation for All Saint's Day (One of the 8 weeks I have this year...French people seriously love vacation) and my friend Kate from home came to visit me for one of the weeks. We started off staying in the town where I am living (Colmar), and spent a day with my host family too. Next we went to the largest city in Alsace, called Strasbourg. It's basically a bigger version of the city I live in. We stayed there for one night and then flew to Vienna, Austria and stayed there for two nights. Vienna was really fun! We stayed a really nice hostel called the "wombat lounge." It was supposed to rain for 2 days straight when we were there but we ended up not having any rain at all! We really lucked out. The first day we went to the St. Stephen's cathedral, and went down to the catacombs that are in the church. There are over 16,000 dead bodies down there from the black plague. Photography was forbidden but I obvi snapped a few pics illegally. Oops.

The next day we went to a palace near the city called Schoenbrunn palace. Pictures weren't allowed inside so I actually went by the law this time, however there were some beautiful gardens that I got some pics of. The inside of the palace reminded me soo much of Versailles, and I finally figured out that Marie Antoinette's mother lived there. Every single room inside was decorated with such detail, I can't imagine the time and money that went into building it. The gardens were enormous, with a zoo, a labyrinth park and perfect landscaping. We of course went into the labyrinth, which wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. We also spent some time playing on the children's playground seen above which entertained us for a good half hour.

View from the end of the gardens