This is the latest I’ve been up since I got here…

That’s right, the clock is rounding 12:30 AM and I’m pleased to say I’m still awake. Hopefully I finish writing this post before I fall asleep, but no promises.

Today we finally got to our finished product; the whole reason we’re here in Vienna. We spent a lot of the day playing with our big, shiny, new toys, learning how to use them, maintain them, and no break them. It was very cool.

After that we didn’t have too much time before everything started to close, so we took a quick jaunt out into the city. We first stopped at the State Room of the National Library because we wanted to see if it was as awesome in person as it was in the photographs. Turns out you have to pay 7 Euros to get into the room and quite frankly, 7 Euros is kind of a lot to stand in a room. So instead we wandered in like dumb tourists, took a quick look around, and skidaddled before we ticked off the workers there. But not before I took a quick and not-that-great photograph. It was a pretty impressive room, but we didn’t have much time to check it out.

By the time we finished that little adventure it was nearly 6 o’clock which meant everything was closed. We walked around for a little while trying to find something else interesting to see, but to no avail. We did go into the Augustinian Church where I took lots of blurry pictures and discovered it has a heart crypt in it. There are 54 hearts of Hapsburg rulers buried there, but (un)fortunately we weren’t able to see them. The above picture is the Rathaus (which is like city hall) and some horse’s butt.

We walk through the Museum Quarter nearly everyday to get to our hotel, so me and Maria Theresia have become tight.

We headed to this little Viennese pub near our hotel for dinner. The atmosphere was nice except for the excruciating amount of smoke in the place. We sat in the non-smoking section and still probably inhaled a pack’s worth of smoke. I got Zweibelrostbraten which is steak with fried onion straws and potatoes. It was so good! I’m not sure I was even that hungry, but I ate almost the entire thing. I also had some fruit wine which tasted like watered down Riesling, but it was enough to get the Asian glow going.

After dinner we headed down to this bar in town which is under a church. We hung out, relaxed, talked, and generally had a good time. The best (maybe most disturbing) part of the evening was getting stared down by a ridiculous accordion player while he played “Edelweiss”. It was awkward to look at him and awkward to look away.

Didn’t get to take too many photos today. I’m off to bed before another big day tomorrow. Gute Nacht!