Today we tried out a different cafe for breakfast. I had a roll with ham and some sencha tea. It's so different building time into my day to eat a leisurely breakfast in a cafe: on workdays at home I eat at my desk, and on weekends I often eat breakfast on the run.
On the way up to the Hofburg, we stopped to take some photos:
Augustinerkirche spire
Josefplatz
Our first excursion today was to the morning exercises at the Spanish Riding School. On the way there we passed the stables (you can see a couple of Lipizzan heads if you zoom in):
This is the arena where the morning exercises take place:
This isn't the big fancy show that happens on weekends, but rather the actual morning exercise for some of the horses. The online reviews are bimodal: horse lovers think it's great, and non-horse lovers dragged there by their partners think it's the most boring thing ever. Susan and I both like horses, so we enjoyed our hour there. If you're not a horse lover, you might want to skip the following wall of text 🤣
Photography is forbidden after the horses enter the arena, so I'm going to try to describe what we saw.
Each 30-minute session had five horses with riders, one of which was a trainee. The full-fledged riders wear double-breasted brown tailcoats, cream breeches, black riding boots, and traditional (but goofy looking!) bicorn hats. The apprentices wear gray jackets with ties, and standard-looking riding helmets.
The horses start with a warmup, going from a walk to a trot to a canter. Later on they work on some of their fancy gaits, including a trot with a pause (I think that's "passage"?), and another one that has the horse moving diagonally while facing forward (their hind legs look like they're crossing).
The performing horses are white, of course, but one of the trainees had a horse that was still dark gray, so obviously a young horse. Their manes were all different lengths, but they were all combed to the left side of the horses' necks.
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After the morning exercises, I walked around a bit while Susan went to the auction house.
Stairs at the Albertina Museum
Hot dog stand by the opera house
Sadly, the opera house was closed to tours both yesterday and today, so I had to content myself with a million photos of the outside, and a couple inside the ticket-office entrance.
Arcade
Fountain
Lobby, viewed from ticket-office entrance
Staircase
Exit from the ticket office
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After packing my bags, I walked down to the Naschmarkt, and eventually met up with Susan there. The market has souvenir shops, restaurants, and all kinds of food (both ingredients and ready to eat). I bought a reusable shopping bag, and some falafel to eat later.
And with that, it was time to say goodbye to Vienna. I stopped at the bakery near our pension and picked up a strawberry-vanilla pastry, then grabbed my luggage and took the U-bahn to the train station.
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The trip to Prague was uneventful, although a little delayed. The countryside is so lush and green, but I'll spare you the random photos taken from the train window. Instead, here's the pastry I bought in Vienna:
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This is the first time I've traveled by myself to a country where I not only don't speak the language, but can't even figure out what most of the signs were saying. Google Translate is extremely helpful when trying to decipher signs in stores (what kind of sandwich am i buying?). The train station is a bit puzzling to navigate: the directions for Uber pickup said something like "upper parking near 1b." It took me several tries to find that there was an escalator around a corner from platform 1b; the only sign I saw there said something about a historical building, and no big "P" anywhere. This must have been the historical part of the building:
I'm staying at Residence Thunovska, up near Prague Castle. The Uber driver had a hard time finding #19 (it is *not* across the street from #18 as one would expect), but eventually I made it here and am now settled in my 3rd-floor (American 4th-floor) room. My stair-climbing muscles have been getting a workout this trip, between the Roman arena in Verona and all the bridges in Venice, so it wasn't too painful to drag my backpack all the way up. (I think, though, that I will try to minimize the number of trips up and down I make each day!)
