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After our usual muesli breakfast this morning, we packed our bags ready to leave Vienna. Our room checkout was 11:00 and our train departed at 12:30, so we had a couple of hours in the morning to do something. Rather than go too far, we decided to take a walk a few blocks to the Museums Quartier, the area of the city where several historical buildings have been turned into various museums.

We passed the large building housing the ZOOM Children’s Museum, the Leopold Museum, the Kunsthalle Wien, and the Mumok, but turned right into Maria-Theresien-Platz, an ornate square with lawns, trees, and fountains. Facing each other across the square are the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Natural History Museum, housed in identical buildings commissioned by Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1871 specifically for these two museums. The square and the Renaissance Revival buildings are picturesque, and in front of the Natural History Museum is a small bronze statue of a slightly cartoonish elephant, making a cute picture opportunity.

From here we continued east towards the Hofburg. We’d seen the back of this palace on our first day in Vienna, from the Burggarten, but now we entered the huge Heldenplatz square in front of the building. This was tourist central, with multiple large tour groups being herded around by guides. We only had time to briefly walk around and take some photos. We went inside the National Library briefly since there was no entry fee, but the foyer led to carious sections that did in fact require entry fees, such as the reading rooms and the papyrus museum.

With time running out, we headed back to our apartment to complete checkout and depart. We left the key inside as instructed and were out 5 minutes before 11:00. We walked wit out luggage to Karlsplatz to take the U-bahn to the Hauptbahnhof once more. We’d seen a lot of this station now! Once there we stopped to buy some bread rolls with cheese and salad on them to eat as a lunch on the train, and also a pumpkin seed pretzel to share as a snack now. Then we tried to find a seat to sit down. One thing about the large European train stations is that they seem to be trying to actively discourage people from sitting down anywhere, as there are precious few seats. I spotted a free table at the food area, but by the time we’d walked the 10 metres or so to get there, some other people had grabbed it. So we stood at the standing counters and ate our pretzel.

As we ate, we saw some other people start to get up from their table over the counter from us and I told my wife to run around and grab it, then I passed the smaller luggage over to her, then followed around with the larger stuff. We finished the pretzel and M. spotted a cafe just outside the station proper, through an exit door to a small adjoining shopping mall. She said she’d go and see if they had a table to sit at and would message me via our phones if so and I could go join her. After she left, and while I was waiting, a man came and sat down without even asking in the seat facing me across the table. I said my wife was sitting there, but he didn’t understand English and seemed determined to stay seated there. Fortunately my wife sent me a message a few seconds later, saying she’d found a table in the cafe and to come over.

I joined her in the cafe where she was having some coffee and grabbed some iced water from carafes on the counter for myself. A couple of times I left to go check the departures board in the station, and when our train appeared it indicated a delay of 16 minutes, then later it increased to 18 minutes. There were 30 trains listed on the board, and ours was the only one with any delay. Our luck with trains this trip really has been awful.

We decided to head out to the platform a bit before the scheduled departure time anyway, just to be careful, and when we got there the train was already waiting there! We boarded and found our seats, having to kick out a man who was sitting in one of our reserved seats. Although the train was there before the scheduled departure time, the screen on board said it wouldn’t be departing until 12 minutes afterwards—I have no idea why. Anyway, depart it eventually did and we were on our way to Salzburg. The train was a long one, which would be split at Salzburg, the front half (our half) proceeding to Bregenz, and the rear half to Munich. But since we were only going as far as Salzburg it didn’t matter.

The journey began across flat country, but about halfway along we began to see mountains in the distance. And the train started climbing in altitude. We did some sketching to make the most of our time. The countryside switched from farmland to hilly landscapes with forests and streams, making the scenery much more interesting than any of our other journeys so far, except perhaps the river valley and hills crossing the German-Czech border. As we climbed up towards Salzburg the sky was growing dark and it looked like rain.

The train arrived at Salzburg just after 15:00. We walked about 10 minutes to our accommodation, which is apparently an actual hotel, although without a reception desk. We just got a PIN code to enter the building and our room sent to us. As we walked, thunder rumbled around us, and in the last couple of blocks it started raining. We managed to make it into the hotel before the rain really got going, but a few minutes later it was steady.

We wanted to go out for a walk and a look around anyway, so we grabbed our umbrellas and set out. The cooler air here was a refreshingly nice change from the hot days we’ve had everywhere else so far on this trip. We walked down the main pedestrianised street of the Neu Stadt side of the river Salzach. Being Sunday, the shops were closed but some cafes and restaurants were open (though not all).

We didn’t go too far in the rain, turning back once we reached the river without crossing over to the Altes Stadt, but we looked at restaurants and found one called Das Gablerbräu that had a traditional Austrian menu with some acceptable vegetarian options. We made a reservation for dinner at 18:30. On the way back to our room we stopped in at a cafe called Ratio Coffee Roasters so my wife could have a coffee. I was a bit peckish after the single bread roll for lunch so had a slice of the delicious looking raspberry poppy seed cake. It was indeed delicious, with a tangy icing and a dense, moist cake.

On the way back to the room we decided to go to the nearest open supermarket to get some milk for breakfast with our remaining muesli that we brought from Vienna. Being Sunday, most of the supermarkets were closed, but I found a SPAR Express a few blocks away from our room and we walked via that. We discovered it was in a petrol station, which was fine, except they had completely run out of fresh milk! They had some UHT whole milk, but I suggested we wait until morning and I dash to the nearest supermarket (only a couple of blocks from our room) to buy some fresh low fat milk then. So we’ll do that in the morning. But the detour did give us an opportunity to engage in our favourite travel pastime of exploring back alleys and places where sane tourists would never go.

We had about an hour and a half in our room before dinner, so did some more sketching and also looking up things in Salzburg. We left again to head back to the restaurant. We were shown to a table nestled in a corner beside the open front door. The waiter came over for our order but we had only decided on drinks and some bread to start, so ordered those. The waiter seemed concerned that we’d only ordered bread and asked if we’d like meat and cheese with it, but we said we still needed to look at the main dishes and would order those in a minute. It wasn’t entirely clear if he understood, or if he thought we were crazy for going to a restaurant and ordering nothing but bread.

A younger waiter came out brandishing a plate of bread, but offered it to the wrong table, and my wife tried to wave at him and say it was for us, but he didn’t notice and left back to the kitchen. Eventually the bread came back. Then later the same waiter came out with two main dishes and offered them to the same table he’d offered our bread, and they turned him away again. The waiter came over to us, but the meals weren’t ours either. Again he left confused back to the kitchen. The service really seemed below average. I was afraid when our meals came he’d offer them to everyone but us! But he managed to get it right, thankfully.

My wife ordered the Kasenocken, cheese spätzle with fried onions. I tried the Wildertopf, a stew of venison and vegetables, served with spätzle. It turned out that “vegetables” meant mushrooms. I did find one tiny piece of carrot, but essentially it was all meat and mushrooms. But it tasted good, with tender meat in a rich sauce with a hint of tomato and black pepper. My wife’s cheese spätzle was very cheesy, with long strands requiring some manipulation to bundle into a forkful. It was perhaps a bit too cheesy, she said.

After dinner we went for a walk across the river into the Old Town. This was very cool, as the Old Town exudes charm from the well-kept old buildings that line narrow pedestrian streets, opening out into several squares with impressive views of churches, towers, and the castle looming above the city on the rocky hill nearby.

There were a lot of restaurants in this area, and also any people walking around. We explored a bit and then decided to turn back home. We went a different way, heading north to cross the river on the pedestrian bridge instead of the road bridge. This led us towards the gardens of Schloss Mirabell. We went in to have a look in the cloudy light just before the sun went down.

The gardens were beautiful, mores that the ones at Bratislava Castle. And here is also the Pegasus Fountain, made famous by the scene in The Sound of Music where the children run around it while singing “Do, Re, Mi”.

And in fact as we approached the fountain, we could hear people singing the song. As we watched from about 50 or 60 metres away, a group of people copied the performance, running up to, then around the edges of the fountain as in the film, then up to the steps nearby while singing the finale of the song and copying the movement up and down the steps. It was a fantastic performance. And then after we approached close to the Pegasus Fountain, they decided to do it all again, this time with one of their own group filming the others. With the warning, I also filmed them doing this performance, and it turned out pretty well. I went up to the group afterwards—it was six people, apparently from the same family—and told them how wonderful their performance was. They were speaking German amongst themselves, but thanked me in English. One woman said it was very difficult, singing and running at the same time!

From here we walked back the shortest way to our room. We got in and had showers before resting up. The rain continued outside. Hopefully it will stop for tomorrow when we have our whole day of exploring Salzburg ahead of us.

Our plan this morning was to go ride on the Wiener Riesenrad, the famous giant ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park; notably used as a set in the James Bond film The Living Daylights. After breakfast of muesli, we went out to catch a train from Karlsplatz to Praterstern. We arrived a bit after 10:00 and walked over to the Prater park, where many of the rides and attractions were open for operation. Prater is an interesting amusement park because all of the attractions are independently operated by different people, and they get to choose their own opening hours. It’s not like a Disney or other amusement park where one company runs the whole park.

The Riesenrad is one of the closest attractions to the train station, so it didn’t take long to get there. Because it was early, there were only a few people queued up for tickets and to ride the wheel. We only needed to wait a few minutes before being let into a carriage with about six other people. The carriages are very spacious, with room to walk about or sit down as you please. There are open windows on each long side for poking cameras out to take photos without glass in the way. We rode only one turn of the wheel, but it moves slowly and stops at each car to let people off and new passengers on, so it took a good 15 minutes or so to go around the once. We paused right at the top for a while and had plenty of time to see the panoramic view of Vienna and take photos.

Once the ride was over, we walked a short loop around some of the other attractions. There was a large ghost train building which was extravagantly decorated with all manner of spooky things, including two fountains of “blood”, which had skeletons lying in the red water, giant skulls, and a guillotine that you could poke your head through and have a photo taken, the blade liberally splattered with painted blood. A creepy voice boomed over a PA speaker—in German, which it sound even scarier. We tok some photos and walked on, past dodgem cars and other things, before deciding to leave.

My wife wanted to visit an art supply shop, so I’d spent some time at breakfast searching for one, and decided that Gerstäcker was the best bet. We’d thought about coming back to the apartment for lunch and then going out to Gerstäcker in the afternoon, but it was barely past 11:00 so we decided to hop on a train and go straight there before lunch. We took a U3 train (our fourth train line) from Praterstern to Schottenring, and transferred to a U4 train to Pilgrimgasse. From there it was a short walk to Gerstäcker.

This art supply store was huge! It extended back from the street front about 40 or 50 metres, with numerous aisles of paints, brushes, paper, pencils, pens, canvas, crafting materials, picture frames, clay, glazes, and so on. There was even a bin full of blocks of marble! We browsed around like kids in a candy store, looking excitedly at all the cool things. M. got a couple of small sketchbooks, while I found some packs of Sakura brand brush pens, like the one we bought in Tokyo and I’ve been using for ink drawings on this trip, only there were packs of nine colours and a pack of six different greys. I bought both of them, and also a small Faber-Castell pencil sharpener that would fit into my travelling pencil case.

Once we were done exploring this Aladdin’s Cave, we left and began walking back along Margaretenstrasse towards our accommodation. It was only one train stop past Kettenbrückengasse where we’d walked to before, so it wasn’t a long walk and we decided to take the opportunity to explore more of the neighbourhood. But first we stopped at a coffee shop named Karl where we had drinks and shared a cinnamon pastry.

My wife asked if there were some toilets nearby that we could use, and the two ladies behind the counter said we could go across the street and into a courtyard where there were several restaurants, and they had toilets in there. So we explored over there and after winding our way through a twisting arcade that we never would have thought to enter by ourselves, we found ourselves in a small courtyard and there were indeed public toilets there, free to use. So that was good.

We walked along more blocks of Margaretenstrasse, noticing that this neighbourhood had a lot of artsy shops, with various design things for furniture, home furnishings, fashion, and also art such as galleries and studios, as well as bookstores and similar sorts of things. So it was interesting and well worth the walk.

Eventually we reached Naschmarkt and stopped at a bakery stall to buy a bread roll for our lunch. We still had cheese and tomatoes at the apartment, so a simple lunch would do us there until our dinner booking in the evening. We made a sandwich each and relaxed in the coolness inside for a while. We did some sketching and M. filled in some of her watercolour painting.

About 17:10 we emerged to walk to our dinner reservation. I’d booked Tian Bistro am Spittelberg, a place that does vegetarian fine dining, and only a 10-15 minute walk from our apartment. I had to book early as later reservation times were unavailable, until 20:30, which was to late for us to eat dinner. We arrived and were shown to a table outside in the laneway, which was pleasant and breezy, better than in the non-air-conditioned interior. We ordered some “sparkling shrub” to drink, which was explained to us as fermented passionfruit and honey, and was delicious.

The dinner was a fixed menu served over four courses. The starter consisted of individual serves of portobello mushroom with marinated tomato, and sharing plates of: green and yellow beans on a white bean puree with hazelnuts; buckwheat waffle bites with rhubarb and some sort of leafy greens; a beetroot tartare; and bread to go with it all, with salted butter and extra virgin olive oil.

Next came two more sharing plates: zucchini chunks, baby zucchini, zucchini strips, and zucchini flowers with almonds, olive oil, and dill; and paper thin sliced kohlrabi with elderflowers, peas, pea puree, and pea leaves.

The main course was a chanterelle risotto with pickled onions, accompanied by a fennel and caraway salad.

And then the desert was two more sharing plates: cheesecake curd on a white chocolate shell with rhubarb sorbet, stewed rhubarb, and rhubarb foam, and thin charcoal stick biscuits; and chocolate mousse with strawberry granita, strawberry sorbet, strawberry meringue, strawberry foam, and macerated strawberries.

All of the dishes were amazingly good and the service was attentive and friendly. Really a very nice experience for our last night in Vienna. After we finished, we walked back to our room to retire before leaving for Salzburg tomorrow.

While relaxing before bedtime I drew some more sketches of our trip, and I tried out the new grey brush pens that I’d bought in Gerstäcker. I drew the Ankeruhr historical clock and took a photo of the drawing before adding the greys, because I wanted a record of it in case I ruined it, since this would be my first time experimenting with the grey pens.

Then I added the greys. I was slightly disappointed that the grey pen tips seemed to be brush shaped felt tips, not actual brushes like the black one I’ve been using. But still they seemed to work okay.

(If you’re interested in more of my sketching from this trip, I’ve been posting more of them over on my BlueSky account.)

We woke up this morning about 07:30 and had our usual muesli breakfast in the apartment. The plan for today was to take a day trip to Bratislava, just across the Austrian border in Slovakia. We prepared fairly lightly. I took my camera backpack to carry a few things in, but left the extra lenses at home to avoid carrying too much weight.

We walked over to Karlsplatz U-bahn station again and caught a train to the Hauptbahnhof. There we used a machine to buy tickets to Bratislava. The short distance trains ran once an hour, with a few extra faster services on intercity expresses shaving a few minutes off the journey, but costing a lot more. We got the regular service, which made about ten stops along the way and took just under an hour.

We arrived in Bratislava at Petržalka station, which is in the southern part of the city, across the Danube from the scenic Old Town area. We could have caught a bus across, but elected to walk, passing through some fairly dull apartment block neighbourhoods before reaching an expressway that we crossed via a pedestrian bridge, before walking across the Most SNP bridge over the Danube. This was an interesting bridge design, with pedestrian paths on either side underneath the roadway above, which was good because it provided shade all the way over the bridge. The day was much cooler than yesterday, but still a little warm in the sunlight.

Once over the bridge we headed up the hill to Bratislava Castle.

You can walk through the grounds, including an attractive Baroque formal garden, for free, but there is an entrance fee to go inside the palace building. We went mostly to admire the gardens and get a view of the castle and palace from outside, as well as the views over the city and Danube below.

By now it was a little hot and we’d been walking a long way from the station, so we stopped in at a restaurant called Hradná (meaning “castle” in Slovak) which was inside the walls with a view over the city. We just got drinks. I got a lemonade with mint, while my wife got an iced coffee. I noted that my lemonade cost exactly the same as a shot of vodka, or a half litre of beer.

After drinks and using the facilities (I added some more sunscreen to my face and arms), we left the castle and descended a flight of steps to a courtyard where there is a modernistic bronze statue called Bosorka (“Witch”), a stylised woman in flowing gown, with large birds staring admiringly at her. It’s meant to be a monument to the women falsely accused of witchcraft in medieval times.

Continuing down the hill we passed a series of colourful houses which made a picturesque scene. From here we crossed the main road into the Old Town area, where we spent the remainder of our time. We walked around the pedestrianised streets, among the old buildings, many of which were filled with shops and restaurants. There were a few tourists around, but it didn’t feel nearly as tourist-packed as the centres of Prague, Vienna, or Budapest. Also, in those places there were mostly American accents, but in Bratislava almost all of the people walking around speaking English were British. We also came across a large and raucous group of teenagers dressed in orange and green who were clearly from Ireland.

We walked through the Old Town Hall courtyard, through Michael’s Gate—the only surviving gate of the medieval city walls.

We also went through St Martin’s Cathedral. This cathedral was the site of the coronations of eleven kings and queens of Hungary from 1563 to 1830, when Bratislava was part of Hungary. It’s also built on multiple crypts, and one area of the floor is made of glass, showing a pit where three skeletons are visible, partly buried in the earth. We also visited the main town square and walked along a section of the old town walls.

Along the way we stopped for lunch at Pressburg Bajgel, a bakery that claimed to have opened in 1890 (when Bratislava was known as Pressburg). My wife had some traditional Slovakian “bajgels”, which were crescent-shaped pastries filled with almond or walnuts or poppy seeds. I tried a Slovak bryndza bun—a bun with sheep’s cheese (bryndza) inside and obvious pieces of bacon on top—and a pagáč—described as a traditional bread with fried bacon. The bryndza bun and pagáč were both heavy and buttery, the first with a slightly cheesy taste, the second quite salty from the bacon and what seemed to be small chunks of rock salt in the dough. They were good, but left a salty aftertaste.

A few hours later it began raining a little, and we stopped in a bar to get out of the rain and have a cool drink. I had a local beer, and my wife got another iced coffee. My half litre of beer cost 1.50€ less than the lemonade I’d had up at the castle!

Eventually we departed the Old Town and went to the nearby bus stop under the bridge approach. I bought tickets for the bus and we hopped on a route 191 that went past Petrzalka Station, to avoid having to walk all the way back. We arrived with about 15 minutes before the next train to Vienna. I looked for ticket machines, but didn’t see any, so resorted to the old fashioned ticket window where a man sold me two tickets to Vienna. The train pulled in soon afterwards to let off passengers and we boarded and got seats at a table so we could do some sketching of the day’s sights as we travelled back to Vienna.

We reached our apartment a bit before 19:00. I did a bit of research to find a restaurant for dinner, something with Austrian food and good vegetarian options. I found Das Augustin, which had vegan “meat” dumplings and vegan schnitzel among other vegetarian choices. It was four stops away on the U3 U-bahn line from the closest U3 stop to us, Neubaugasse, a ten-minute walk away. We did this and took the train to Johnstrasse, and the restaurant was only a block from there. We went inside and the place appeared completely empty. A waitress told us to go out the back and check with her colleagues see if there were any tables. We found an open-air courtyard there, with dozens of tables and packed with people. The waiter there found us a table, but we noted that a lot of people were smoking, so we said we’d prefer an indoor table. We ended up being the only customers sitting inside.

We ordered some tortilla chips and salsa as an appetiser, and when it came we realised our mistake as the serving was huge. In an odd Austrian touch they were drizzled with sour cream. For our main meals M. got the vegan dumplings with sauerkraut, while I decided to go with another classic Wiener schnitzel, this time with pork instead of veal. It came with potato salad and cranberry jam, which were both nice. The servings were huge, but so good that we got through most of it. We left most of the chips though.

Then we walked back to the Johnstrasse station around a large church nearby to see the view from the front. A short train ride and a walk later we were back at our apartment for another night.

Tonight we did another load of laundry. This time we didn’t have any competition for the washing machine, and got it done quickly. One thing about the laundry room is that the light is on a motion sensor switch. There’s no way to just switch it on permanently—I tried the switch in the room and it just turned the light off completely. But when it’s on, the motion sensor turns the light off if it doesn’t detect anyone moving right near the door (about two metres from the washing machine) after about five seconds. So we were both standing at the machine, I unloading clothes and my wife holding the bag for me to dump them into, and every few seconds the light would go off, leaving us in pitch darkness, and my wife would have to move over to the door and wave her arms around to get the light to turn back on so we could see again. It took us about five or six rounds of this before we had the machine fully unloaded and all the clothes in the bag to take upstairs.

We woke up a little before the alarm rang at 08:00 today, so jumped out of bed as soon as it went off. We had the last of our muesli and milk for breakfast. We had a bit of left over milk, so I drank some in a glass, but I got quite full and so we ended up pouring a bit down the drain.

Our hosts had given us until 11:00 to check out, saying they’d be back to pick up the key and clean the apartment for the next guests. This gave us a couple of hours to go for a bit of a walk and see some last sights in Budapest before returning and getting ready to leave with our stuff. We took a short walk in a different direction where we hadn’t explored yet. We passed the Jókai Tér square near the Oktagon metro station, which had a few of the restaurants our host had recommended. Here also was the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, which had a somewhat impressive front facade. But we didn’t spend long here since it was morning and not really restaurant time.

We walked over a few blocks to the New York Café, which bills itself as “The most beautiful café in the world”. M Googled it to find out some info earlier and told me that wearing shorts was not allowed in the café, and that a cup of coffee cost 9.50€ (or A$17). I read a few reviews and they talked about the string orchestra and piano playing inside. When we got there, we saw it was no joke, although they did actually let me into the foyer area with my shorts. We just stayed inside a couple of minutes and took some photos of the exceptionally lavish interior before leaving again. it was worth seeing, but almost definitely not worth having anything in there.

We walked back through the Jewish quarter of Budapest. We saw several kosher restaurants and food stores, and stopped in at Judapest, a Jewish art store, which had a few interesting things. It was just after 10:00 and the day was already getting very warm, even in the shade, with the maximum predicted to be 37°C in Budapest today. As we walked back home, we passed a courtyard leading off a nearby street that we hadn’t been down before, which contained rows of food stalls. The gate was closed and it said that it opened at 11:00. This sounded like a potential place to have lunch a bit later before heading to Budapest-Keleti train station.

Returning to our apartment, we cooled down a bit in the air conditioning and packed our bags to leave. I checked e-mail, joking that I needed to see how long our train had been delayed today… and found a message from ÖBB saying that or train was indeed running 48 minutes late! I grabbed the garbage bags to run them down to the bins on the ground floor, and when I opened the door, the owner and his wife were outside, collecting cleaning equipment from a cupboard in the foyer. They greeted us and we handed over the key. They asked us how our time in Budapest was, and we told them we’d had a great time. We grabbed our bags and were on our way.

It was too early for our planned lunch, so we went around the block to Circusz Cafe, another of our host’s recommendations, this one for breakfasts. We went in and got a table and saw that the breakfasts the other customers were having looked very impressive indeed. Giant servings of pancakes, waffles, eggs benedict, and so on. A couple behind us were having a savoury breakfast each, and then also splitting a giant serve of strawberry covered waffles. Having had breakfast and not wanting to spoil lunch, we just ordered green juice for my wife and a ginger shot for myself, and a croissant to supplement the smaller portion of remaining muesli I’d had earlier. As we had these slowly, we saw other people arrive and also order breakfasts for each person, plus a serve of waffles to share afterwards. It seemed like the thing to do!

After lingering for some time in the cool air conditioning, we braved the heat to go to the food stalls and get some lunch. There were fortunately seats in the shade, and we selected ones shaded by an adjacent building, rather than under a tent roof, as those ones were hotter. We tried some lángos—deep fried bread dough topped with various things. My wife had one with sweeps cheese and rocket leaves, while I tried one with sour cream, grated cheese, bacon bits, and red onion jam. They came from the stall piping hot and were delicious.

Lunch done, we walked to Astoria metro station to catch a train to Budapest-Keleti station and wait for our train to Vienna. On the way we passed the Great Synagogue, which was an interesting sight.

When we got to Budapest-Keleti, our train was on the departure board, with no delay indicated. The station is a graceful old Victorian grand European style station building—beautiful, but in need of a bit of repair.

It only had four platforms inside, with an extra five or so tacked on either side outside. it was also very hot inside, with a hot breeze blowing through. We found one seat near the main doors and took turns sitting there with the bags. I explored and found a side entrance foyer that was magnificently decorated, with gold ornaments and paintings of scenes on the walls, including one of a railway handcar attended by angels.

The departure board changed to show a delay of 10 minutes, and we wondered if it was going to do the trick of updating every ten minutes to add an additional 10-minute delay. But eventually we got a platform assigned—number 3 out the left side of the building—and moved out there to wait. It turned out our train was 13 minutes late arriving. We climbed on board and found ourselves along in a compartment of six seats, which was pretty nice, although the train was very old and felt like it was a real Soviet-era piece of hardware, with sagging brown velour sprung seats and a faint smell of old furniture. It was hot inside, but after a few minutes the air conditioning turned on, and though it did blow coolish air through the vents it was never very effective at cooling down the compartment.

We pulled out about 20 minutes late. At the next stop, still within Budapest, a young guy got into our compartment. He was Hungarian and spoke only halting English, but had better German, so sometimes we used German to communicate concepts that he had trouble expressing in English. He turned out to be a cook, on his way to a new job in Linz in Austria, where he was apparently going to be doing bartending, even though he told his new boss he’d never done that before. He saw me doing some sketching in my sketchbook during the trip, and was interested to see what I’d drawn of his home town, Budapest, so I showed him and he was impressed.

He actually spent most of the trip sitting out in the corridor, talking on his phone. We had the door closed initially, thinking it would help keep the cool air conditioning in, but we discovered that it was actually cooler in the corridor and opening the door made things better. At one point the small table my wife was using to hold her watercolours collapsed and her paints fell all over the floor, so we had to pick them up and reassemble all the little pots into the palette box. There was an announcement over the PA in Hungarian, and the guy translated and told us our train was expected to arrive in Vienna an hour late. We said it had only left Budapest 20 minutes late, and he just shrugged and said this sort of thing happens in Hungary.

As we approached Vienna, the sun disappeared behind thick grey clouds, and we saw lightning and heard thunder. A heavy rain fell for several minutes, but stopped again. I checked the weather radar for the Vienna region and found storms sweeping east across the country. We were happy about this as whopped it would cool the hot day down before we arrived.

As it turned out, our train was indeed about 63 minutes late into Vienna. Fortunately we had no plans for the evening, so it wasn’t a problem. We caught the U-bahn to Karlsplatz to walk to our apartment. But when we got off the train I had no idea which way to go to find the exit nearest out accommodation, and I chose randomly, and very very poorly. We ended up at the Vienna Opera House, which was about the worst possible exit we could have chosen, an extra few blocks from where we needed to go. But the day had indeed cooled down and the sun was hidden so the walk back to our room wasn’t so bad.

Walking back through Naschmarkt, we spotted a decent looking pizza place, where the pizzas that customers had looked very good. We decided to just take it easy and go there for dinner after dropping out bags at the apartment. We were worn out from the very hot day and the longer than expected train journey. So about fifteen minutes later we were back at Al Bacio Pizzeria. We took the table that the staff were having a cigarette break at, as they jumped up to serve us. This table was nestled under an awning, against the wall, where it would be protected from any rain, hopefully. We were a bit concerned that the storm would hit and there would be heavy rain and wind, but as it turned out we only got a few drops of rain and some thunder as the storm cell must have skirted around us. My wife ordered a pizza margherita, while I got the calzone, which came with ham and salami inside. They were indeed very good, with thin Neapolitan style dough, but blistered and chewy around the edges.

After eating, we returned to our apartment, showered off the sweat and grime of a hot day, and relaxed by doing some of our drawing in the evening.

We rose with the alarm at 08:00 after last night’s late night. I ran down to the supermarket at the end of our street to get some muesli and milk for breakfast while my wife got up more slowly. We ate about half the muesli, leaving some for breakfast tomorrow. Then we prepared for a morning out. Since the day was going to be very hot in the afternoon, we planned to go to the Central Market Hall of Budapest first thing, then cross over the Erszébet Bridge to visit Buda Castle, then walk back to our room for a rest in the heat of the afternoon, getting lunch somewhere along the way as we felt hungry.

First we had to walk to the Central Market Hall. We went west to the northern end of the famous Váci Utca shopping street, then walked south along its length. Since it was before 10:00, most of the shops weren’t open yet, but many of the cafes were. We passed a place that M. wanted to go back and have another look at when it opened, and I saw a Rubik’s Cube shop that had a sign mentioning an exhibition celebrating 50 years of cubes.

At the far end of Váci Utca was the Central Market Hall.

This sprawled over three floors of a street block covered with wrought iron latticework and a roof of tiles punctuated by glass. We walked the ground floor first, which had stalls selling all manner of fresh food: meat, smallgoods, fruit, vegetables, cheeses, bread, spices, nuts, and so on. We’d expected to be able to get a snack ready to eat here, but this floor didn’t have any sort of food ready-to-eat. I bought a tin of smoked hot paprika to take home for my mother to cook with. We found one stall selling cakes and slices and my wife bought a piece of cherry slice for a snack, eating half before passing it to me. When I bit into it and started chewing, I felt the awful crunch of biting a cherry seed and shattering it into fragments. I had to spit it out as I didn’t want to swallow any of the seed fragments. I was more careful and found two more seeds which I spat out (into the bag the slice had come in), but in the last mouthful I shattered another seed. Oh well, at least it tasted good.

We went downstairs which promised more for, thinking it might be down there, but this was a smaller area consisting of just one of the three big aisles above, and mostly selling seafood or pickles. There was also an Aldi down there. My wife wanted an iced coffee and we hand’t found anywhere yet, so went to a place we’d seen signposted at the far end of the ground floor – it was sort of out in an ancillary section that had just a few handcraft stalls and a cafe booth. She got her coffee here.

So finally we went upstairs to the first floor, and here we found where all the ready food was! There were proper restaurants and stalls selling cooked sausages, goulash, lángos, chips, and various other things. But this occupied only one corner of the upper floor. The rest was dedicated to souvenir stands, clothing, and various nick-knacks. This was the least interesting section and we walked through it quickly.

We left the market and walked over to the Erszébet Bridge, then across the Danube River to the western Buda side of the city. As we began walking north towards Buda Castle, my wife spotted a small shop that she wanted to look in. They had small notebooks with artistic covers of Budapest scenes and she bought one. The day was really heating up by now, and when we stopped to drink some water from our bottle, the friendly lady in the shop told us to drink it up and then refill the bottle from her small kitchen. So we did that and were very grateful.

We continued walking to the Castle, which was uphill a fair way. It was getting close to 13:00 and we were getting hungry. We stumbled straight into a restaurant called VakVarjú VarjúVár, which was halfway up the hill to the castle. We got a table outside where there was a gentle breeze to help keep us cool. My wife ordered a trio of dips with bread: goat cheese, paprika and walnut, and smoky eggplant. I ordered a platter of meats and cheeses which came with pickled onions, a bit of salad, and bread. My wife had an iced coffee while I tried the strawberry and basil lemonade. The food was really good, and the drinks were refreshing and cool. My plater had slices of three types of cured sausage, a paste about halfway between liverwurst and pulled pork, Spanish style jamon, smoked cheese, and slices of brie, with pickled red onion slices and small white cocktail onions. We considered this a great find at random for lunch.

After our rest and recharged with food, we continued up to the castle, taking the lift from the restaurant to avoid some—but by no means all—of the remaining stairs. But it was worth it when we got to the top, for the panoramic view over the Danube towards the Pest side of the city,

and also the spectacular castle buildings. We took many photos, and walked around to look at the buildings and statues and fountains. We didn’t pay to go inside and tour the palace, museum, and national library, as we didn’t want to spend too long here. It was very hot and we used umbrellas to keep the sun off, and were pretty much the only ones doing so.

Returning was easier, walking down the hillside through a lovely series of switchbacks through dense trees. We walked on a little bridge over the funicular railway that offered visitors an easier way up the hill. Eventually we made it down to the end of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, which we crossed back to the Pest side of the city. We walked back to our apartment, via the Rododendron art shop that my wife wanted to see yesterday. While she browsed there, I went to the corner of the street to Beer Brother craft beer bar and had a refreshing weissbier. I finished just as she arrived to rejoin me, and we went back to our room.

By now it was about 16:00, quite a bit later than I’d expected us to return! We relaxed in the air conditioned room and did some sketching of our travels. I also tried to find a good place to have dinner, somewhere with Hungarian food, but also vegetarian options. I tried searching up all the places that our accommodation host suggested, but none of them had much choice for vegetarian dishes. So I tried asking ChatGPT to make a list. The very first one it came up with was Kisharang Etkezde, a small place which it noted was highly recommended for its several interesting vegetarian choices, and which was a short walk away. Some of the others also looked interesting, but were further away, or had no reservations available for tonight. Kisharang didn’t even take reservations, so we decided to go there and see if we could get a table.

As it turned out, the place was very busy and all the tables taken, but when we asked if we could get a table soon, the waiter said if we just waited a minute some people were leaving and he’d clean the table for us.

So we were seated soon at a table just inside the door, adjacent to another table for two, set just a few centimetres away. The menu did indeed have several good looking vegetarian choices and vegetarian options for some of the other dishes that could also contain meat. We chose to start by sharing the intriguing cold raspberry soup with cream, which was delicious and refreshing in the heat. My wife ordered hand made noodles with cabbage, while I tried Hungarian rösti with the chicken paprikash option (they also had about four other meats and a vegetarian mushroom option).

As we were awaiting our main dishes, an older couple came in and got the table next to us. They asked if we spoke English and we helped them figure out the menu. The woman wanted to know if there were any fish dishes, as they hadn’t been handed menus yet. I didn’t recollect seeing any, and my wife grabbed two menus from the counter behind us and gave them to them. We chatted a bit as we all ate our meals – they were from Florida in the USA, but she was originally Jamaican. They were travelling on a Danube river cruise that began in Bucharest, but Budapest was their last stop before flying back home tomorrow. She’d recently written some sort of self-help book that had been published and was thinking of starting a second.

For dessert we ordered an “apple pie”, which turned out to really be a sort cake with an apple filling. It was good, especially with the very good vanilla ice cream it came with. And it was much larger than the photo in the menu had suggested. Overall it was a really good meal, and a fantastic suggestion thanks to ChatGPT.

We walked back home via the Hungarian Parliament building, which is a huge sprawling complex in a Gothic style building running along the bank of the Danube. Twilight was beginning as we approached, and I thought it was going to be disappointingly dark, but as we watched the floodlights came on, illuminating the building beautifully and providing perfect photo opportunities.

We waked all the way around the building, returning on the river side along the bank, where many people were strolling, or sitting with their legs dangling over the edge above the river, enjoying the warm night air. Some people were even having a barbecue there, using a public picnic table to eat on. Eventually we turned inland and returned back to our accommodation for our last night in Budapest before retiring to Vienna tomorrow.

We had another lazy wake-up, followed by the usual muesli breakfast. We had a couple of hours free after that before needing to pack overnight bags and leave for our train to Budapest, where we are spending two nights before returning to the same apartment in Vienna. We decided to make the most of it by walking over to Karlsplatz and the park there to look around.

We didn’t quite know what to expect from the Karlskirche which faces the park, so we were impressed to find just how big it was.

We went inside the entrance and found that there was a charge of 9.50€, which we paid. The fee included entrance to the main church area on the ground floor, as well as access to a wide stone spiral staircase that led up first to a small room with a large cut-away model of the church showing the interior and exterior. There were also historical drawings, photos, and information about the building of the church. Across from this room was the organ balcony, overlooking the nave and towards the main altar from the rear of the church. So we got close to the organ itself, but the view out into the church was amazing. It was richly decorated, with detailed paintings, carvings, statues, and gold filigree.

From the organ room we continued climbing up another level, where there was a room full of clerical artefacts such as old robes, mitres, stoles, a dozen or more gold communion cups, crosses, and so forth. Then we continued up the stairs again, which eventually led us out to the roof of the church, behind the row of statues above the front door, and with a very close view of the great cupola dome, covered with green copper. We had a decent view over the surrounding area of Vienna, although in some directions it was cut short by taller buildings. After taking some photos we descended again all the way down to the ground floor and then toured around the inside of the main area of the church. It was very impressive. I especially liked that above some of the side chapels the ceiling had an elliptical hole cut in it, giving a view to the main ceiling above, where a matching shaped painting was located.

We left the Karlskirche and walked back to our apartment to rest out of the heat for a bit and pack our bags for the trip to Budapest. On the way we bought a couple of additional snacks for the train trip: a pumpkin seed bread stick and a salted pretzel. We made sandwiches using the bread and cheese bought yesterday and took them in the plastic bread bag to eat on the train. We also took some grapes and blueberries.

While doing this, I checked my email and found an update from ÖBB (Österreichische Bundesbahnen) about our train. It said that because of a shortage of train cars, our train would be missing carriage number 414, so we might not have any assigned seats any more. I checked, and sure enough, 414 was the car in which our seats had been assigned. The email said to contact the train attendant to see if we could get new seats. We decided to leave as soon as we were ready and check at the ticket office at the Hauptbahnhof to see if we could get new seats assigned there. So we walked back to Karlsplatz and caught the U-bahn to the Hauptbahnhof.

There we went into the ticket office and had to take a number and wait a good 15 minutes or so before I saw a staff member. I explained the email I’d received and the woman said I had to see the attendant on the train. I asked if she could find new seats for us, and she said yes, and then I asked if I’d have to pay for new seat reservations, and she said she’d do it for free. I’m not sure why she didn’t just do that to start with, but anyway, she gave me a new seat reservation in a different car, and everything seemed fine.

Then we went outside to check the departure board to see if our train had an assigned platform yet, only to discover that it was marked as being 20 minutes late. To kill time we wandered around some of the shops and stopped in at one that was a combined lingerie shop and cafe, where my wife got an iced coffee and we sat at one fo the tables there. I took a quick walk around and discovered that they sold not only lingerie and coffee, but also coffee machines, bicycle gear such as locks and gloves, and kitchen utensils. It was a very odd mix of things.

When we emerged we took a quick look in a newsagent where my wife checked out some small notebooks, since she’s trying to buy a small sketching book from each city we visit on the trip. I suggested we needed to head to our platform for our train, but when we checked the departures it was now delayed by 30 minutes. We were getting hungry, so we found a table near the food shops to sit and eat our sandwiches. I sent a message out our contact at our accommodation in Budapest that we’d be arriving about half an hour later than I’d previously told him.

We went to the platform to wait for our train. There was an announcement that it was now expected 40 minutes late. And then another saying 50 to 60 minutes late. We continued waiting. The announced delay became 60 to 70 minutes. Then 70 to 80 minutes. We gave up standing around and grabbed a seat in the small glass-enclosed waiting area on the platform. The delay seemed to stabilise at 75 minutes, and eventually our train pulled in.

We climbed aboard and found our seats; two adjacent ones facing backwards across a table at two forward-facing seats. But the train wasn’t full and nobody sat there. The train just stayed at the station though, not moving, until an announcement are over the PA system that departure would be in 10-15 minutes. In fact it was something like 20 minutes later that the train finally began moving, a good hour and a half after the scheduled departure time. I sent another message to our accommodation contact to say we’d now be arriving more like 90 minutes late.

As the train took us out fo Austria and into Hungary, the information display screen listed arrival times at the stops along the way, and gave an estimated arrival time in Budapest of 17:22, almost two full hours later than our originally scheduled arrival. At times we sped across the landscape, but as we got towards Budapest the train slowed down to a crawl. We pulled into Bicske just before 17:00. After a couple of minutes stopped there, the PA system announced that the train had broken down and all passengers had to alight and catch a bus the rest of the way to Budapest!

We were slow to get our things together and follow everyone else off the train. We slowly walked up the platform, following the stream of people going down stairs at the end to go out to the street and presumably wait for whatever buses they’d arranged to carry us the rest of the way. As we began walking, another train pulled into the opposite platform. It was a local train, bound for Budapest-Déli station. This was on the west (Buda) side of the Danube, rather than our intended Budapest-Keleti station on the east (Pest) side. But I figured this was close enough and suggested we jump on board. So we hopped on and managed to get seats. I checked the Budapest train system map on board and found that Budapest-Déli was on the same M2 metro train line as Budapest-Keleti, the one we wanted to take to Deák Ferenc Tér, the closest stop to our accommodation. So this was fine. The only issue was this was a suburban train with several stops, instead of an inter-city express, so the trip took an extra 20 minutes. I messaged our contact once again to say our train had broken down and we were now on a local train, expected to be another 20 minutes late, arriving after 18:00 (as opposed to our original estimate of 16:00). He wrote back saying, “Ohhh! I am sorry! This is Hungary!”

So after an eventful journey we eventually arrived at Budapest-Déli station. From here things were easy. We bought metro tickets and hopped on an M2 train the four stops to Deák Ferenc Tér, from where it was just a few minutes walk. But, oh! I’d assumed our contact would be inside and we’d buzz the right door, but we didn’t see any matching name labels on the door intercom. So I contacted him again through Booking.com and he said he’d be right over in about 15 minutes, and suggested we wait in the adjacent cafe, which had air conditioning. He arrived with his wife and the two of them showed us inside, gave us the key, and also gave us a quick tour of the apartment we’ll be staying in for the next two nights, and gave us recommendations for nearby restaurants and sights.

After this we freshened up a little and then went out for a walk. My wife had wanted to check out an art shop nearby named Rododendron, but it closed at 19:00, and by the time our hosts had finished and left us alone it was too late to get there. But we decided to walk past it and check out the neighbourhood quickly, before finding a place for dinner. We’d seen glimpses of the Gozsdu Udvar courtyard, an open area in the middle of a block lined with restaurants and bars, and decided to walk through it. We found a bistro called Spiler Original, which had some a decent sounding vegetarian burger special, and we were getting hungry, so we sat at a small table by the bar, inside away from the smokers. There was also a roasted cauliflower with crispy broccoli dish on the regular menu that my wife decided sounded better so she chose that, while I decided to try the most traditional Hungarian thing and went with the goulash and potatoes, washed down with a dark Hungarian craft beer. The food was actually really good – better than I expected from a place that seemed in the middle of a tourist area.

After eating we decided to make the most of the cooler evening air by going for a walk into the centre of the town to see some sights in the twilight. Out first stop was a kurtosh cart, selling the traditional funnel cakes, either plain of filled with ice cream and various flavours. I got a nutella and ice cream one, which was okay, although honestly I’ve never much liked these kurtosh cakes—we have a place near my home that makes them and I’ve tried them there and was similarly unimpressed.

We walked over towards Erszébet Park, which contains the Ferris Wheel of Budapest.

We figured why not, and paid the fare for a ride on the wheel, since the queue was very short. We had a short wait, and then entered a cabin and were whisked up into the air above the city. The view in the early twilight was perfect and we got several photos in all directions from the top.

After the ride, we walked north towards Szabadság Tér (Liberty Square), passing along a street lined with numerous busy restaurants, with a good atmosphere of lights and people. Along the way we got a view of St Stephen’s Basilica, down a long plaza perpendicular to the way we were walking. We reached the square and turned around, coming back down a parallel street, passing right in front of the Basilica this time. Again, a beautiful photo opportunity in the twilight.

This led us back to the area close to our accommodation and we wandered back home for the night. We stopped in at a few small food markets on the way, but none had the muesli we wanted to buy for breakfast. We decided to get up and go to the large supermarket on the corner after it opens at 07:00 tomorrow.

We woke up lazily this morning, having a bit of a lie-in. We decided to go to the nearby Naschmarkt to get something to breakfast, and then pick up some groceries form the nearby Billa supermarket on the way home to make lunch for later in the day.

We arrived at the Naschmarkt just after 08:00 and were surprised to find that most of the stalls weren’t open yet, despite the market being advertised as open from 06:00. This was rather disappointing. The few stalls that were open were mostly either sit-down cafes, fresh fruit and vegetables, or stalls selling sweets, nuts, or baklava. So much baklava. It was like every second stall had guys pushing baklava or “free” samples of nuts or dried fruit at us. We stopped at a cafe to get some bites for breakfast: a sort of thick flaky pastry filled with nuts for my wife, and one filled with poppy seeds for me. They were pretty good.

We walked the length of the market and decided to head back via the supermarket. We stopped in there to buy some muesli for breakfasts for the rest of the week, with milk (real milk this time, not buttermilk), yoghurt, and we also bought some fresh fruit: bananas for me and grapes and blueberries for my wife. We also got a box of tissues since there are none in the apartment, and a small tube of toothpaste.

Back in the room we had second breakfast with the muesli. While we did this I checked out public transport tickets for Vienna. We’re half an hour’s walk from the centre of the city, and normally we’d mostly walk everywhere, but with the hot and sunny weather we don’t want to be out and exposed to the sun all day, so we decided to try getting transport to and from places. I found that they use validated paper tickets, but you can buy a 7-day pass which can be loaded into the WienMobil app on a phone for a discount. This was perfect since we’re here for a week (apart from our overnight side trip to Budapest tomorrow). So I set us up with the app and we bought the 7-day passes online.

For our first venture out we walked just a couple of minutes to Kettenbrückengasse U-bahn station and caught a U4 line train to Schwedenplatz. Here we emerged and walked roughly south-west, through streets lined with shops and cafes, zig-zagging to see various sights such as the Ankeruhr historical clock, which is mounted on a bridge between two buildings over the road beneath.

We also visited the Peterskirche, a baroque Catholic church with an extremely intricate decorated interior. We walked along the Graben, Vienna’s busy main plaza, which we’d only really glimpsed yesterday. It was bustling with people and interesting sights everywhere. I was taking photos of statues, fountains, buildings, and all sorts of things.

Eventually we reached the St Stephen’s Cathedral again, which we saw briefly last night. This time we went inside to have a look at the interior. It was actually a bit plain and disappointing compared to the Peterskirche. And there was a mass in progress so we couldn’t go in very far, so we only spent a couple of minutes before leaving again. We looped around west again, behind the rear of the Peterskirche, heading towards the Herrengasse U-bahn station. We’d decided to head back to our room for lunch, and to take the train again rather than walk all the way. We took the U3 line to Volkstheater and changed to the U2 line to Museumsquartier, from where it was a short walk to our apartment.

I let my wife go inside while I dashed around to the supermarket to buy some tomatoes to add to my sandwich. We had rye bread with emmenthal cheese, and I sliced a tomato to go on mine. I also ate one of the bananas I’d bought. We rested for a while in the air conditioning and my wife did some sketching. We did some online research to try to find some interesting neighbourhoods a bit out of the city centre and tourist-heavy areas. We thought we might find somewhere fun to walk around and find a nice quiet restaurant for dinner. Some searching led me to Hietzing as a likely candidate, while my wife suggested Neubau.

We decided to try Hietzing and caught a U4 bahn from Kettenbrückengasse in the other direction, past Schloss Schönbrunn, to the Hietzing station. My research suggested this was a fancy neighbourhood with perhaps boutique shopping and funky cafes and stuff, but it turned out to be rather dull and small. Google Maps indicated another commercial hub in the area around Jagdschlossgasse, so we caught a tram out there, but if anything this was even less interesting, being just a short string fo dull businesses and a handful of tired-looking restaurants. My wife checked in a bookshop for sketchbooks, but otherwise we didn’t spend much time here before catching a tram back.

We continued on the tram all the way to Westbahnhof, at the western edge of Neubau. Here we walked east along Mariahilfer Strasse, which turned out to be an amazing and lively wide mall lined with busy shops and food places. By now it was after 17:00 and we were getting hungry enough to consider dinner. I searched for somewhere nearby that might do Austrian food and have vegetarian options, and I found a place just a block away called Gasthaus Zum Wohl, which was 100% gluten- and lactose-free, with Austrian style dishes and several vegetarian and vegan options. My wife liked the sound of it, so we walked the short distance there and were given a table outside on the side street, where it was thankfully shady by now and had a mild breeze blowing to keep us a bit cooler than if we’d been inside (the waitress said there was no air conditioning).

We ordered some baked tomato risotto balls with pesto and salad for a starter, then my wife had spinach dumplings in spicy tomato sauce, while I had the Wiener schnitzel with potato salad.

My wife really liked her food, while I thought the schnitzel was okay, but not as good as the one I’d had in Berlin. The gluten-free breadcrumbs probably didn’t help, unfortunately. The starter was quite big, and I worried that we would be too full for the mains, but thankfully they weren’t enormous and we managed to finish, but we had no room for dessert. At least not yet… My wife decided to buy a slice of apple strudel from an Aida outlet on the main street that we walked past, to take home and eat a bit later in the evening. That was nice, but quite different from strudels I’ve had at home. This one seemed to be baked longer, making the pastry brown and crisp, rather than paler and softer.

We continued walking the length of Mariahilfer Strasse until we reached our apartment, where we showered off the heat and sweat of the hot day, and then relaxed into the evening.

Our main job this morning was to catch our train to Vienna. We got up and had breakfast, finishing off the muesli we’d bought. I tried Google Translate on the not-milk that we’d accidentally bought, and found out it was soured buttermilk. Which was surprising, but not bad, as buttermilk is pretty good.

We went for a short walk so I could take some photos of the main square and Astronomical Clock with a long lens, and my wife could get a morning coffee. We found a small Italian cafe just off the square and she got a flat white there. They also has focaccia sandwiches and we bought two caprese ones to take with us for lunch on the train. They kindly packed them in a paper bag for us, with serviettes.

Coffee done, we went back to our room and grabbed our bags to check out, leaving the key in the lockbox as requested. Then we walked back to Prague’s main station for our train. When we got there, the departures board indicated that no platform had yet been assigned for our train. The station was very busy, with a lot of people standing around watching the board to find out where their trains were leaving from. The morning was hot and it was pretty warm inside the station. They had a large Lego version of the station building in a glass display case, which was pretty cool.

After ten minutes or so of waiting, the departure platform was announced and joined a horde of other people streaming the same way. Once on the platform I tried to find any indication of where our car number might pull up, but couldn’t find any. So we had to just hope it would be nearby. As it happened, when the train pulled in our car was just a few steps away, and we were right at the front waiting to get on. A lot of people got off though (the train had come from Berlin), and it took several minutes. And as we waited, a man drove a small cart pulling a trailer up and started beeping to get people out of the way. It was tricky with people trying to get off, people crowded around trying to get on, and this cart trying to move everyone away. It looked like the trailer was delivering food for the adjacent restaurant car or something, and slowly the guy pulled forward until the cart was almost blocking the door we were waiting to get in. This forced people waiting on the opposite side of the door to retreat to provide a way out for the people still climbing off the train. So when eventually the stream of people stopped we were the first ones to climb aboard.

Our seats were almost in the centre of the carriage. We were supposed to have facing seats on the aisle, but a woman and man were sitting in the forward facing seats, so we took the window and aisle seats opposite them. The train pulled out for the four hour trip to Vienna, stopping at Brno and Břeclav. The man opposite us got out at Brno, but the woman stayed all the way to Vienna. She had earphones in and was doing stuff on a laptop and didn’t talk to us. Across the aisle from us was a very chatty Asian Australian guy, travelling with two kids, who during the course of the trip told his entire life story to the young British woman sitting next to him.

During the trip we both worked on our sketchbooks. I drew a few scenes from Prague, while my wife filled in her ink scenes from yesterday with watercolour.

We arrived at Vienna Hauptbahnhof just before 15:00. We disembarked and descended the nearest stairs from the platform, which led us to a quiet area with exits in three directions. Using a map to get our bearings, I realised we’d come out the far eastern exit of the station, whereas the best way to our accomodation was from the west (main) exit. But there was no way to get there without either going back up to the platform and walking along it, or exiting the station and walking around outside. We did the latter, reaching the main part of the station, which was huge and busy. From here we walked towards Naschmarkt, which is near our accommodation.

But when we got there, it seemed clear that this was another small set of guest rooms to be accessed by a key code at the door, and a lockbox inside with a key. But I hadn’t received any instruction for how to get inside or access the room key. I searched through my messages from the accommodation and didn’t find anything. So I tried phoning the contact number, but nobody answered. I sent a message through the Booking.com app, and hoped that someone would see it and get back to us. We waited several minutes, with no responses. I scanned the QR code on the accommodation sign at the door, but it said the URL domain was vacant! We started to fear that the accommodation had stopped business and taken our advance payment without informing us!

A man came out of a door next door, pushing a trolley with bottles on it, and we stopped him to ask if he knew anything about the accommodation there. He said as far as he knew it was there and pointed at the sign to suggest we contact them, which we’d already tried. Then an older couple emerged from the door, and we stopped them to ask if they knew anything about the accommodation. It turned out they were staying in one of the other apartments run by the same guy, and they had an SMS message chain with him, and said they’d just contacted him an hour ago. The woman tried phoning (the same number I’d tried), and got through! She explained to him (in German) that we were here and didn’t have check-in information. She listened and then told me to phone him again, and hung up. I called the number again and the guy answered straight away. Phew!

He said he’d sent check-in details to me via WhatsApp. I’d noticed WhatsApp on my phone giving me notifications a day or two ago, and from the notification summary it looked like spam because the guy had sent several messages and the one that was summarised was restaurant recommendations, so I’d ignored it and actually deleted the app, because I don’t ever use it and didn’t want more spam notifications. So he did actually send the check-in info, but I’m a bit surprised that he used WhatsApp as the medium. Anyway, he sent me the details via iMessage, now he knew my phone number, and within a couple of minutes we were safely inside, finally.

The apartment we have for the next week is very nice, with a kitchen, a separate bedroom, and a balcony overlooking a central courtyard. Once we dropped our bags, we went out to get a quick cold drink. One of the places the owner recommended was a cafe just on the corner of the street, so we went there. It was closing at 17:00 and by now it was 16:30, so we had just enough to to get drinks. My wife had an iced caffe latte, while I tried their home made pear and ginger lemonade. It was nice, though I’d hoped for a little more of a ginger kick to it.

We returned to our apartment and looked for some place to have dinner. We felt like something simple and easy, with guaranteed good vegetarian options, so chose a Thai place called All Reis, which was abut 20 minutes walk away in the Inner Stadt area. We stayed in the cool air conditioning until after 18:00, then ventured out into the sultry evening air to walk there. We passed a lot of amazing sights on the way. It looks like there’s a lot to see in Vienna!

When we got to All Reis, there were half a dozen outdoor tables, all occupied, and we were shown to a table inside, and near the back behind a partial dividing wall. There was no air conditioning and it was very warm, with a rotating floor fan blowing air around. We were so warm we moved tables to get closer to the fan. We ordered some vegetarian rice paper rolls to start, then I got a chicken pad siew and my wife got stir fried morning glory in soy chilli sauce with rice. The food was good and very filling, with generous serves, which was good because we were both hungry after our simple sandwich lunch on the train.

After eating we walked back to our apartment via a different route following our noses at first down interesting looking streets and discovering amazing sights at each turn. After a while we ended up at the main St Stephen’s Cathedral.

From there we turned to a more direct route home, passing through the Burggarten, a lovely grassy and tree-filled park looking onto the Hofburg palace.

Then past the historical art museum and back towards our accommodation.

We’d planned to do a load of laundry tonight using the apartment’s laundry room, so we checked that out on our way in. We saw that a completed load was in the machine, and thought we could bring down our laundry and take that load out onto the table there while starting our load. But five minutes later when we returned with our bag of dirty laundry, two other people were there and had just started a load! The machine has 1:38 on the timer to run. So we had to go back down later at almost 22:00 to start our load.

We didn’t set an alarm this morning, but still woke up before 07:00. We had the muesli we bought last night for breakfast. However the “milk” we got turned out not to be milk, but a sort of drinking yoghurt. I’d scanned two different bottles of milk with Google Translate and determined that both of them were apparently full fat milk (so I don’t know what the difference (was). But then we spotted another carton next to them that looked to be the same amount for a slightly lower prices we grabbed that and went. We didn’t bother to scan it to translate the Czech text, and so ended up not getting milk at all! Nevertheless, it was fine and delicious.

The first stop this morning was Havel Market, supposedly touted as the best street market in Prague. It was only a couple of blocks away. We got there just after 09:00, but they were still setting up lots of the stalls, even though the market is supposed to open at 07:00. Also the variety of stuff there wasn’t great and the whole market was pretty small. Overall it was pretty disappointing and we finished scanning up and down the stalls in about 20 minutes or so.

My wife had also found a Saturday farmers’ market, held on the bank of the Vltava River, a bit of a walk away, past last night’s restaurant. We went there via a different route and ended up walking along the river bank on a promenade near the water, below street level, which was nice. This market was much better than Havel. It had many more stalls, all actively preparing food or selling items, and a buzzing crowd of both locals and tourists walking to and fro. My wife stopped for a coffee at one of the first stalls. They gave her a plastic cup which had a 50 koruna deposit, so we walked down and came back later to drop it off.

Across from there was a stall which had a huge queue, maybe 30 or 40 people long. They were lining up to buy bread spread with pesto. They had five or six different types of pesto and most people were having a huge slice of rye bread with stripes of the slightly different greens spread on them. It must have been good! There were also stalls selling bread, cakes, nuts and dried fruits, meats, cheeses, fruit and vegetables, and cooked food including grilled meat, sausages, potatoes, and things like tortilla wraps, pizzas, and so on. And there were craft stalls, clothing, beer, wine, mead, chocolate and other sweets, and more. The stalls went for maybe 300 metres along the river. We bought a large chunk of a slice made with seeds, nuts, and dried fruit as a snack to keep us going.

At the end we turned around and walked back the way we’d come. We exchanged my wife’s used coffee cup for the 50 koruna deposit and then went looking for a stall where we could spend the coin on something. We found a guy with baklava who had a chocolate and pistachio version for 48, so we gave him the whole coin for it and shared bites. It was melty from the heat, but delicious. We walked back to our room via a (mostly) different route. M. stopped in at an art supply shop that we’d spotted on our way out near the Tesco’s, to briefly look at sketching and watercolour books.

We rested in our room for about half an hour out of the heat of the day and prepared for our afternoon expedition to Prague Castle. On the way walking there we stopped to get some more sustenance. I got some hot chips with cheddar cheese melted on top from Fæncy Fries Kaprova, while M. grabbed an iced coffee from an adjacent Starbucks. Then we continued, walking across the Mánesův Most bridge, north of the more famous Karlův Most. From there it was an uphill hike to Prague Castle, mostly against traffic of people coming down. As we figured out, most of the people visiting the castle were going in the opposite direction to us, entering by the gate we exited at, and departing by the gate we entered.

Once we had climbed the hill we entered at the eastern end of the castle. I didn’t realise that anyone could enter the castle grounds freely. You only needed to buy a ticket to gain entrance to specific attractions within. We had the basic ticket, which allowed us into the Golden Lane, St George’s Basilica, St Vitus Cathedral, and the Old Royal Palace. The first one we came across was the Golden Lane, but unfortunately it seemed all the attractions had been routed to be convenient for people coming from the west entrance and leaving the way we’d come in. We had to walk in a fair way, then backtrack around through the Golden Lane and then retrace our steps again to continue.

The Golden Lane is a narrow laneway lined with tiny medieval houses which apparently housed precious metal and gem workers. A few of the houses had been converted into shops, while some had been made into museum displays of old tools and furniture, as though the workers still lived and worked there. It was cramped in there and we had to wait for others to shuffle in and out. And I banged my head on the low lintel coming out of one.

From here we went to the Basilica of Saint George. The exterior is a rich salmon pink colour and of a style that looks only a few hundred years old, but the interior is obviously much older, being mostly bare limestone, pitted with age. It was consecrated in 921, so is well over a thousand years old. It was a very interesting look at a medieval style basilica, with faded paintings on some of the walls.

Next was St Vitus Cathedral, a much larger Gothic style cathedral, the largest church in the entire Czech Republic. I took photos of several of the external gargoyles before we headed inside. This was very impressive, with some amazing stained glass windows, some of which looked quite modern, and a soaring ceiling high above the vast interior. Around the back of the main altar was a giant reliquary or something made of enormous amounts of silver.

Our final call was the Old Royal Palace, attached to some buildings that looked like a more modern palace. The old palace also looked close to a thousand years old, and consisted mainly of the large Vladislav Hall, with some adjoining rooms. One of these contained the window where the two Catholic lords regent Count Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice, Count Vilem Slavata of Chlum, and their secretary Philip Fabricius were defenestrated in the 1618 Defenestration of Prague, triggering the Thirty Years War.

After touring these sights, we left the Castle via the west entrance and walked back down the hill towards the river. We crossed on the Charles Bridge (Karlův Most), taking our time to admire the statues and views from this historic bridge. It was pretty full of people walking in both directions and the sun was hot in the afternoon. Just before crossing we stopped at a gelato place and got cups of gelato to cool ourselves down and stave of any hunger until our dinner.

We rested in our room for about half an hour and then it was time to go out for our dinner. We had an early reservation for 17:30, since the Restaurant Zvonice said that they were booked out later. We walked over to the Jindřišská Tower (or St Henry’s Tower), a clock and bell tower, the tallest in Prague. The restaurant is on the 8th floor, surrounding some of the bells, making it a really unique location, with old medieval wooden beams and views through the partially shuttered windows to the rooftops below.

The place served traditional Bohemian cuisine, and also had some decent vegetarian options. We chose the goat cheese terrine appetiser, my wife had the truffle risotto, while I had wild boar with blackberry sauce, potatoes, and mushrooms. The food was really good and the atmosphere couldn’t be beaten. Definitely a good choice for our last dinner in Prague!

On the way home we took a slight detour to go see the Old New Synagogue. This is the one where the legendary Golem of Prague is supposed to be slumbering in the attic. There is an external ladder on the side of the synagogue leading to the attic, which made a good photo. After this we returned the short distance to out room for the night.