I went to Austria this weekend.

And it had its ups and downs. I can't decide if I liked it or not. What I did like, however, is this roof. It's the roof of Stephendom, or the Cathedral of St Stephen.

Pluses of the trip:

• the touristy stuff was cool, like the Opera House and the Imperial Apartments
• the food was good
• I ate Sacher torte. yum.
• My hotel was weirdly decorated, and I like weird stuff. I should have taken photos. My favorite part was that the nighttable had a built in radio.

Minuses of the trip:

• There was a group of Slovakian high schoolers on my flight from Brussels to Vienna. High schoolers are obnoxious, no matter where they come from.
• I took the train from the airport to Vienna, which was fine. But when I got to the train station, there were no taxis anywhere, so I had to stand there with my guidebook and figure out how to take the metro and get to my hotel. Luckily it wasn't hard, but the train station was dodgy.
• I was changing metro lines at a station, and I almost got pulled into a fist fight! This old guy punched another guy and nearly pulled me down when he fell, but I managed to jump out of the way quickly.
• There were lots of dogs. Not cute little Parisian dogs, but really big dogs, all wearing muzzles.
• I was constantly getting lost, and I have a pretty good sense of direction, normally. I just couldn't figure out where things were in this city.
• When I got back to Brussels, I took the train back into the city. There were these 2 couples at the train station, who had too much luggage to carry down, so they decided to send it on the escalator with one of the women. It wasn't until I was halfway down the escalator behind her that I realized what an incredibly bad idea that was. The woman got caught at the bottom of the escalator with two of the bags, and she fell. I had to hurdle over her and the bag, and then I turned around and helped her up.

Neither good nor bad:

• I went to an opera on Saturday night. It was in English, with German surtitles. I couldn't understand the English, and I can't read German. So I have no idea what happened in the opera, but the room was pretty, the costumes were pretty, it was only an hour, and I had only paid 15 euro for the ticket.
• When you travel alone, people tend to think you are not a tourist. So all the guys dressed in costumes who were harassing the other tourists to go on their horse carriage ride or their Mozart walking tours left me alone. In return, I got harassed by homeless people asking for money and German speaking men asking me for God knows what.

So. Overall, I would have to say that I would not recommend Vienna to people who have never traveled abroad before. Despite the fact that it is full of touristy things to do (I did not see half of what I would have liked to have seen) I think it's not really an easy place to be a tourist. I don't really see myself going back anytime soon.

But, if you want to see pictures, click here. Sorry the inside ones are a bit dark... I don't know why they came out like that; my flash did go off!