Vienna, visiting the highlights

Our first goal today is the Danubetower where one can rise with a fast elevator (6 meters per second) to a height of 165 meters. It is a very far walk from the nearest U-bahn station and from afar we can see that we can also try a bungyjump from the tower.

We stay safely within the cage. The restaurant is closed and the sight is not really special. All the impressive buildings one sees in the city cannot be recognized from here.

So we go to the Ferris wheel to try that out. Within 10 minutes we are back on the ground and the views were a bit the same. This time, it is also raining, so we are not very enthousiastic.

Next, we go to the Hundertwasserhaus, a building painted by an artist (and art professor) who cannot stand straight lines. It is a fairly normal building, made attractive by the colours and the curved painted lines. Of course, it has been made into a commercial attraction.

Our next destination is the Schmetterlinghaus or butterfly-house. According to our travelguide 'one dives into a fantastic world of animals, plants, giant trees and waterfalls'. To us it seems more like a very damp greenhouse of about 30 meters length with a path to the end and back again. The giant trees are fake, we see a few birds (2 or 3) and the waterfalls are litlle streams with a height of 1 metre at most. But the butterflies are fantastic and that's what it is all about!

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Meanwhile we have paid more than € 40 to entrance fees; since we entered Austria we have spend as much money as we have all the weeks before, not even counting the campsite and hotel costs. It is a beautiful country, but not very cheap.

The sun shines and the sun disappears again, and this goes on all day; sometimes it even rains a bit, but the temperature is allright. We walk quite a few kilometers and sometimes we need a break, like on this (sunny) square.

In the afternoon we walk to the Votivkirche, a church we had seen yesterday from a distance, but now from the nearby Sigmund Freud garden. On the stone on the foreground a saying of him is engraved: "Die stimme des Intellekts ist nur leise" (The voice of the intellect is only soft).

There is an open-air film festival before the monumental town hall, with the theme peacefull coexistence. Stalls from several countries sell their national food. Quite funny is the fact that the Russian stall sells hamburgers and hotdogs.

Back at the campsite we walk a bit back along the street since we have seen a nice building from the bus: it is the socalled Nymphaeum Omega, also called the Brunnenhaus, especially build next to a 1000-year old oaktree.

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It has been another busy day, especially the transportation (bus, U-bahn, walking) to get to places took a lot of time. And the nicest things turned out to be for free. Vienna is a nice city, but for now we have seen enough.