To Vienna and Beyond

Wednesday 7/17/13 continued...
Our traveling companions arrived at around 22:00 from the station near Florence.  We all went to bed and woke up at almost every stop, not very restful but better than a seat. 

Thursday  7/18/13

We arose at around 6:30 and waited for our complimentary kaiser rolls and tea.  We met our companions who were two girls from Denmark.  One was studying to be a teacher and another a doctor.  Very nice and informative on where they have been and what they have done.

Mark went for a walk to the end of the train to watch the scenery.  As he was there he met a young girl Laura from Austria.  They talked for about half an hour until her stop came up.  She was traveling through Italy by herself.   She was 18.  Her ticket expired the day before and so she had to beg a ride from the conductor to get her close to home.  She was not allowed a seat.

As our train came in to Vienna around 9:15 we decided to carry our packs with us and tour the city.  What a bunch of hicks.  We were not real sure what to do in Vienna so we just started walking and found a man who was promoting a show about Mozart that evening and asked for suggestions.  He mentioned a bus tour around the city.  We decided to find out about it and see the cost.  There were two bus tours, the yellow line and the red line.  We decided to go on the red line, it was supposed to be around one and a half hours but was closer to two.  It was a wonderful tour where we got to see a lot of older bldgs. and the history of Austria very interesting.  

As soon as our tour ended we had to hurry back to the train to catch our 14:32 train from Wien Meidling (Vienna) to Praha (Prague).  We made it and arrived in Prague around 19:30 with no clue where to stay or what to do.  We found a tourist info. at the station and the man found us a hostel a quarter mile from the station.  It cost each of us 15,65€.  Not bad for a nights sleep and a shower.  We arrived and found a 4 bed room just for the 3 of us.  It was clean and had wifi which was very nice.  

We decided to go out on the town get some food and explore.  We first needed money.  The bancomat did the job; 200 czech krona for 10.18 U.S.  We had no clue where to go so we just wandered and found people going to this place which later we realized was the town center where they had stores, food and even entertainment.  Night life is different than in the states our places close down around 22:00 and these places are just getting going.  We ate some Prague sausage had ice cream and watched 4 guys perform a skit which was very entertaining.  We decided to head back to the hostel around 10:45 so we could get caught up on the internet.  Sorry you haven't heard from us personally but wifi has been a little hard to find.  We took showers and went to bed around 00:15 excited about exploring Prague.

Friday  7/19/13

We woke after a good nights sleep had some rolls with peanut butter and headed out to see Prague.  Again we had no clue what to do but we did know where to go so we went to the train station and stowed our backpacks in a locker.  We finally headed to the city center to see about another tour, this time in Prague.  We found one that went out at 12:00 and was an hour long.  We booked it at 9:45 so we had 2 hours to wander.  We found many parts of this city but had no clue what they were.  The food vendors everywhere and musicians as well.  What a beautiful city.  We headed to our tour and learned a lot about the Czech Republic and its history.  The many areas that we explored finally had names and a history that made sense.  

We got done with the tour and found some food to eat, tried to get rid of all of our Czech krona and rushed back to the train station to get our packs and hit our next train.  We were supposed to take the 14:29 train from Prague to Berlin but it was delayed by about an hour, so we really didn't need to hurry but that is part of the adventure.  

Currently we are on our train the EC172 headed to Berlin hopefully arriving at around 20:30 and then we start all over again trying to find a place to stay and then touring the town.

Well we made it to Berlin.  We found the train information place and scheduled our next leg of the journey.  We will get on the train Saturday night at around 22:30 and sleep again, then hopefully we will end up in Malmo, Sweden.  That is the place where my grandfather Oscar Larson was born and then headed to America when he was 3.  

Tomorrow in Berlin we will do some wandering, but we are thinking of taking a tour of a concentration camp.  We'll see.  All is good here, we found another hostel for the night, Mark and Gloria are the hostel parents.  Maybe the Lord prepared us by working at M-dub.  It is 22:50 here and these old timers need to get some sleep, we don't sleep on the train as much as Kjersten.  So long for now.  We are trying to figure out how to download pictures but not working out so check out facebook if you want a peek.