Wayne's European Adventure: Vienna, Switzerland, and Milan

It's been a crazy week, so I've been really far behind on updating my blog.

I arrived in Vienna and go to my hostel. I then realized that the same two guys that I met in Amsterdam and Prague were staying in my hostel. I started chatting with them and ended up going to a small and good restaurant to eat dinner and watch the soccer game. It was a pretty good dinner with schnitzel and bier. We later went to a pretty terrible bar full of tourists that spoke Spanish. We just decided to leave and headed back to the hostel. I ended up staying up chatting with fellow travelers and a birthday girl until 02:00 or so.

I spent the next morning updating my blog and doing some research on places to say and things to do. I finally left the hostel around 13:00 to explore the two castles in Vienna. There were stunningly beautiful, but I got tired of walking so I just headed back to the hostel. I started chatting with other backpackers and we headed out together to get dinner and watch the games on that night.

The next morning, I roamed around downtown to see some major sights. However, it got boring pretty quickly, so I just headed back to the hostel to read. I spent most of the day just sitting around and relaxing before heading to the train station to board my night train to Zurich.

The night train to Zurich was probably the most miserable experience of my trip. My barely reclining chair gave me little to no space for my legs, so I spent most of the night readjusting myself to find a comfortable position. I may have gotten four hours of sleep. I got to Zurich around 07:30, but Megan wasn't arriving until 12:00. I spent the next four hours in McDonald's reading a book to pass the time away.

Megan arrived around noon as planned. I was pretty excited to have a traveling buddy for the next week and a half. We started walking around town and ended up at Burger King for lunch. I can't believe I paid $8 for just a cheeseburger. Since I everything was so expensive, I spent the next two days hungry and found myself munching on all the snacks I bought in Prague and Vienna.

Megan and I headed to Interlaken were we easily found a hostel to stay for the next two days. Apparently Interlaken is known for its extreme sports; too bad they were so expensive. We went on a free walking tour of Interlaken with Viktor. It was really rainy, but we were greeted with a double rainbow when we got to a viewing point on a mountain. We got dinner at the hostel and hung around to watch the soccer games. I attempted winning a 2 for 1 skydiving ticket, but two guy beat me in limbo. I clearly need to work on my flexibility and limbo technique.

The next day, Megan and I went hiking in the Swiss Alps. We took a train over to Grindelwald and began hiking up the mountain, but we couldn't find the route up to the top. We discussed biking up the mountain, but it proved to be expensive and probably too physically taxing. We ended up taking a cable car up to the the top of a mountain ~2000m call First. After lunch on top of the mountain, we hiked to a beautiful lake (Facebook profile and cover photo) and began to hike down the mountain. I was extremely happy that we didn't hike up the mountain; it was hard enough to hike down the mountain. I managed to slip on snow and slid a good 12 feet down the side of a mountain. After hours of trekking, we made it back down to the train station to go back home. I ended up falling asleep on the 30 min train ride... whoops, I guess I was kind of tired. Megan and I got dinner at a local restaurant and ended up doing computer stuff for the rest of the night.

On the last day in Interlaken, we walked to the train station to find a way to Zurich. We found out that an avalanche blocked the train route from Zurich to Venice. Therefore, we had to go to Milan as our next destination. We grabbed our luggage from the hostel and headed to the port. After a nice boat ride, with the exception of the groups of middle school children, we climbed up a large hill to the train station. I thought that it would be a nice change of pace to walk uphill, but it was 20 times worse. Megan and I had to carry all of our extremely heavy bags up the stupid hill. It was relatively short train ride to Milan, but it was extremely crowded. Obviously I fell asleep on the train.

We got to Milan, but Megan and I didn't have a place to stay yet. We went over to an internet cafe to book our stay at the Zebra hostel. It is a very weird hostel because a lot of things have zebra print and the are no signs labeling the place. The front door only has a medium sized zebra to identify the hostel. Megan and I didn't do all too much the night we arrived except for more computer work. There were a lot of bugs flying around the hostel. I'm not a big fan of mosquitoes bites.

Megan and I set out exploring the city the next morning. It was probably 85 F and sunny today. We saw some cool churches and what not. We wanted to go see the Last Supper, but all the tickets were sold out for the day. At least we can say that we were within 50m of the painting. We headed over to the Da Vinci National Science museum, but it was somewhat underwhelming. On our way back to the hostel, we found a park with a lot of sun bathing Italians. After we got back, I ended up taking a quick nap before heading out for dinner.

I'm basically spending the night in to look for hostels in Rome and writing this blog. It seems like it's going to be really warm from now on, 80's and sunny everyday.