Round the World: Vienna and Cousins

While boarding the train to Vienna from Prague my dads wallet got stolen (pickpocketed) and we were left with only 7 euros for the whole time we were staying in Vienna! How would we survive? We managed to sneak onto a train at the Vienna train station and we found our hotel. My dad spent the whole night trying to get some cash but only managed to fail. The next morning (after treating ourselves to a delicious cheeseburger at McDonalds) we went on a bike tour around Vienna and it took some time to get used to the bikes again since we hadn’t been on one for quite a while. We went around a ring round that goes around the major attractions of Vienna and we saw Roman statues and buildings, stables and heaps and heaps of horses, some famous libraries, gardens and we even managed to enjoy ourselves at lunch (even though we only had 4 euros left)! At the end of the tour we went to go and collect some money from the bank and walked out with 300 euros (at least we can afford something now!). We asked if our cousins that we were meant to pick us up a day later would pick us up and they said they’d love too! They came and picked us up at 3:00pm that day and we started the 2-hour journey to their house in the center of Austria in a small town called Bruck (pronounced Brook).

Our Cousins

After arriving a day early at our elderly cousins house they had to think of something to do with us so we decided to talk about the family. It turns out that Hubert (one of our cousins) was once a skiing instructor and a rescue skier, which is a pretty cool job since it always snows in the winter in Austria! We went into the small town of Bruck and visited the small stores and the old church and realized that it wasn’t that small after all, actually between the size of Havelock and Hastings! The second day we were staying with our cousins they took us for a “walk” (walk being huge hike!) and we climbed the hill up to their house and then back down and up again and the Austrian hills are very steep and in the winter it’s even harder because there’s snow on the ground, which makes it slippery! We also went out further into the Austrian country and visited a huge lake up in the cliffs, but when we arrived it sadly started raining, we got absolutely soaked. The third day we went out once again into the Austrian countryside and visited another lake, this one was a little bit smaller though. My brother and I spent the whole time going on the flying fox and going on the swings and by the time mum dad and our cousins got back from their walk around the lake we decided to go for an Austrian lunch. I had a delicious chicken schnitzel and for dessert a banana spilt (not necessarily Austrian though!) and we ventured back home to relax and do some maths (Mr Green I’m almost finished all of my sections!). The next morning we were treated to a delicious boiled egg and some lovely toast as well, we then sadly went to the train station to go to a town on the boarder of Austria and Italy (it was on the Austrian side though) called Villach (where we hopefully wouldn’t get pickpocketed again) and then we were to take a 4 hour bus journey down to the canal ridden, swamp lands of Venice (hoping that it didn’t stink that bad)!