Last night we each left a shoe outside our doors because December 6 is St. Nicholas Day. Lucky for us he left chocolates in our shoes. Today we are in Vienna, Austria. This port is the one that I was most excited to visit. We decided to take the ship’s complimentary City Tour of Vienna which includes a panoramic bus ride, guided orientation walk, free time and a ride back to the ship. Once the bus ride to the city center was done, we struck out on our own.
Today was all about Christmas markets. The first one we visited was Stephansplatz which surrounds the massive St. Stephen’s Cathedral. The usual stuff was here like at the other markets we have been to … food, drink and crafts. We also checked out some of the surrounding stores. By now it was time to rest and fuel up, so we ended up having lunch at Wienerwald.
We stumbled upon the Am Hof and Altwiener Christkindlmarkt markets. These were much smaller markets but still very charming.
Our final market was Wiener Christkindlmarkt which is in front of Rathaus city hall. I believe this is the biggest market in the city.
By now it was time to head back because Nana and Karen are going to the Private Viennese Concert this evening. Because of the concert, there were two seatings for dinner tonight. The first one at 5:45pm to accommodate those going to the concert and 7:15pm for those that were not going. Marie and I decided to join Nana and Karen for dinner because we did not want to wait until 7:15pm to eat.
We wondered if we could catch a ride with the people going to the concert so that we could go back to the city center to see the lights. We asked Igor the Cruise Director and he said it would be no problem.
Once we were all dropped off, Marie and I had about an hour to explore Vienna at night. We went back to Stephansplatz and the lights were magical. We even had time to go into St. Stephen’s Cathedral. We saw everything that we wanted to see so we headed back to the bus and waited for Nana and Karen. They said the concert was awesome. We finished up the evening back in our cabin sampling sacher
torte, a must have in Vienna.
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