cathedrals, not churches

Today was my first full day in Vienna. First I will back track and catch up on yesterday.

Konrad picked Alex and I up from the airport around noon. He is completely awesome and so helpful. We bought two subway tickets and headed to Haus Erasmus. After we checked in we had to go register with the city that we will be living in our district. Next we rode to the university to try to get out student IDs and ultimately obtain discounted subway tickets. Admin office is closed. We then came back to Erasmus, said goodbye to Konrad, and headed to our rooms. I feel asleep at 7pm Vienna time, noon home time. I proceeded to sleep for 14 hours, getting up once around 530am for about 15 minutes. It was a drowsy, disoriented introduction to the city, but extremely helpful nonetheless.

Wednesday. At least I think it is Wednesday. I would have never guessed that but indeed that is what the calendar reads. I managed to get myself out of bed around 10am. Alex and I went back to the University to get our id cards. We cannot get these until Monday. Cool. We now use the hour we have left on our 24 subway card to make our way down the U4 to the outer ring of the city centre.

Once we left the sub station we began to walk aimlessly through the streets. Vienna is amazing because no matter where you are going there is always something to see. The buildings are hundreds of years old. The intricate designs of one building could easily keep me occupied for half of an hour.

To sum it up in less words, we wandered around the eastern part of the ring, stumbling upon beautiful buildings that we had no idea their purpose, and meandering through the turning streets to find churches that peeked over the rooftops. We went into St. Stephan Cathedral, which I felt resembled the interior of Notre Dame. These are also 7 year old memories of Notre Dame, so I'm not sure how close the structures actually were.

This lion head was at the base of a tower that stood in front of an intense building. We could not figure out what it was, but had a Latin phrase written under a double headed eagle.

Outside of St. Stephans Cathedral

We decided to go to a coffee shop to get something to warm up with. I ended up ordering a hot chocolate, which I wanted, and a chocolate cake, which I didn't necessarily want. At first we tried to order at the bar and the lady told us to sit down. When she came to take our order I obviously was not communicating the word pastry well enough so I said dessert. She then asked if I wanted chocolate cake. I said no. She repeated the same question. I didn't know what to do, so I ordered the cake. SHOULD HAVE LEARNED GERMAN. The cake was delicious but I cannot keep ordering things I don't want because I don't know how to communicate.

Later on, while looking extremely touristy with my nose in a map, a boy on a biked stopped and asked if we needed help. Jacob, I believe just wanted to practice his english, but was extremely helpful. I told him that we had already seen St. Stephan's church and he quickly noted that is was not a church. In Vienna they have cathedrals. Churches are the buildings we have in America. Vienna definitely has cathedrals.

Insert around three hours of walking in awe of architecture.

Once we arrived back at home my roommate arrived. Her name is Jessica, she is from Canada, and she is pretty cool. Schnitzelhaus for dinner and then mingling with the others in the building ended the night. Getting extremely tired now.