Day 5 - Happy 30th Birthday Terra!!

Happy 30th birthday to Terra !!

Breakfast was roasted zucchini and tomatoes, bacon wrapped sausage, and scrambled eggs with goats. Mia is having fun every morning.

We have a lot of time to get to the palace. Sadly, the world is out to thwart us. The metro station we need is closed, since they are doing on the section of the line near us. So after running around, and finally figuring this out, we ended up taking two taxis and arriving early and some poorer. 

The palace was an amazing example of the lavish lifestyle of royal families. There was a wide variety of room styles and most of them amazingly lovely.

But the palace is so popular with tourists, they sell the tickets for specific timeslots. This means that a) it is always really crowded and b) the audio tour is designed to move you along as quickly as possible. It is really a brilliant piece of crowd control. They offer you free audio tours. So once you finish listening, you feel like you should move right along.

After about 45 minutes touring all 40 rooms, and then it's squeezed through the tiny gift shop in order to make it to the exit, we set out to explore the grounds, which in their own way were even more impressive than the palace.

The labyrinth and maze area were probably the most fun. First we had a lot of time in the maze before finding the center, then we played the games in the labyrinth and children's labyrinth (or maze, we can only guess what what).

We stopped at a cafe near the palace for a late lunch, which was tasty, but it was very crowded and we ended up in a table in the shade outside, so it was very cold. Service was pretty terrible too.

After lunch we found the orangey, which was super disappointing because it was under renovation. But the marionette theater was pretty cool.

Finally after 5.5 hours, we were done and headed back into town. This is the first time I've been to the concert hall, so we could be sure of it. The food was better than the first night and there was much more of it. After that, we went to a cute little bakery to get cake to celebrate Terra's birthday.

Finally, we made it to the concert in the beautiful Musikverein hall. The music was good (Mozart's Symphonies Es-Dur, KV 543; g-Moll, KV 550; and C-Dur, KV 551, "Jupiter-Symphonie"), but for the first half everyone was very sleepy. We chatted during intermission, which helped us to wake up (except Chen, who did end up falling asleep).

You would think that when we finally made it back to our apartment, we would collapse into bed, but instead we stayed up and chatted, then sang Happy Birthday to Terra a half hour before her birthday ended :)