We headed down south east to another church (insert name). We weren't thinking of going in, but then we saw they had an elevator all the way to the top as part of their restoration process. Having never been all the way at the top of a church's dome so we got in line and took the elevator 2/3 of the way to the top. From there we walked up the staircase to the top where we had view back to downtown Vienna.
At the top, there was one of the guys working on renovations climbing on top of the support beams with nothing below him and no harness. I don't normally have issues with heights but it gave me some vertigo seeing him doing it and I still get an uneasy feeling just thinking about that situation. We took the elevator back down and wandered around the church listening to the audio tour before heading over to another palace. Here, they had gutted most of the inside and converted it into an art museum with some very impressive and well known pieces such as (insert art stuff here).
The audio tour was really good and gave a lot of history towards the various paintings. There were a lot of famous paintings. We shared an audio tour (bringing a headphone splitter was the best idea ever) and learned a lot of the backstory behind the pictures. They did a good job having audio recordings for each of the pieces; it is so much better than a painting on a wall with no information. From here, we made our way to the Austrian national library. They had an exhibition of their tourism postcards and posters made by the national tourism bureau as well as the changes made before and after Nazi occupation. Since we both love travel so much, it was awesome to see this glimpse into tourism and how it turned to propaganda during the Nazi regime and reverted back after the occupation.
We headed back out to grab lunch at this sandwich shop that was rated highly on tripadvisor that I wanted to see. It turned out it was the mini sandwiches not actual size ones. we got a plate of a bunch of them and had a snack before heading back to the hotel and checking out. We caught the subway back to the train and hopped onboard to head over to Budapest. We were hungry so we ordered some food and I decided to get a drink. The options were either schnapps or budweiser. I opted for both after quizzing them about the schnapps they had. When asked if it was good, his response was "it grows on you". Needless to say it was terrible and I washed it down with my beer.
We got into Budapest late and encountered a subway system that wouldn't take credit cards or any bills over 5000 things because a subway ticket only cost 30 or 40 things. We ended up getting the down low from another couple to go to this tiny stand and buy the subway tickets there. We did, grabbed the subway (the most run down yet we had seen) and take that out to our transfer to a different metro line. There was a huge dichotomy between Vienna and Budapest. Where Vienna was more clean and felt 'safer', Budapest was loud, dirty, run down and there were tons of people roaming the streets at night. In the states, they'd be up to no good, but it was just people hanging out drinking. We figured out the subway and metro, ended up at our Hilton, got our Gold status upgrade and went to bed.
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