Another 4-day weekend, another train trip! This time, a last minute decision to go to Vienna. We really had no idea going in what to expect – but the trains were cheap and it was Christmas Market opening weekend. We loved it!!
Our kids are obsessed with graffiti! 
Vienna was family-friendly, easy to get around, tons of great history and architecture, and two awesome museums that our whole family loved – the Music Museum and the Technology Museum. The people were all super friendly and we had plenty of Viennese coffee & cake!!
Musical stairs at the Haus of Musik 
Conducting a real-life orchestra – harder than it looks! We only saw 1 person complete a song 
Being a TV broadcaster at the Tech Museum
We came across a church that wasn’t tops in any guidebook, but we couldn’t get enough. They had installed a giant reflective Christmas ornament as art inside – it made the whole church come alive:
Feeling the awe 
Vienna has an extremely hip and welcoming culture – one of the central areas has walk signs that feature same-gender couples. But I have to say the video at the Music Museum with a cow-pig relationship may have crossed a line:
Yeah!! 
Yeah!! 
Hmnm…
The Christmas Markets blew our mind – I don’t know what I’d pictured, but they turned out to be even better than we hoped. There’s a previous post about these so I won’t go into detail here, but I feel I have to post some of our favorite things (including the 20 bales of hay that were dumped in the churchyard for kids to play on while adults drank the gluhwein!). If you have ever thought about visiting during the Christmas markets, I highly recommend it!!
Before we left, the kids and I went to Mass at the Hofburg Palace Church and got to listen to the Vienna Boys’ Choir sing a Mass by Mozart (along with a 12-piece orchestra). It was a really cool experience, despite the fact that you have to purchase tickets to the Mass (!) and I was too cheap to buy seats with a view. We watched it on TV from the second balcony, but we did get to go downstairs and take Communion from the priest who was celebrating!
We definitely want to make it to Vienna again – it was a real crowd-pleaser – and the 5 kilos of coffee we bought there are about to run out 🙂
Newmans in a New Land 