Vienna, Austria

I made it to Vienna today and am having a great time. The city is so clean and beautiful. It reminds me a bit of a modern-day fairy tale. The hostel I am staying in is very near the train station that I came into, so it was a nice easy walk from the train station to my hostel.

The only complaint I have so far with the city is that the tourist map you are given by the Info Center requires the vision of a young Clark Kent to read. The city is quite large, and has a lot of small streets, but there could be some way of them having larger maps of each district or something. When I was walking around today, I had to strain my eyes and my navigation skills to read the 1:50 scale map. I think the biggest problem with the map is not the size of the streets listed on it, but all of the street names are really long German words, so everything on the map is abbreviated or too small to read. I am sure I will learn to deal with it.

Got in contact with my Webster friends studying here, so I think I am going to try to meet up with them tomorrow and figure out where in the world the campus is.

A word of advice, make certain in Budapest that you: a) have a valid ticket for the metro, and b) if you are going to have to change metro trains, buy a transfer ticket. I bought a three day metro pass while I was in Budapest so I could ride as much as I needed to and not worry about the transfer pass. I thought that the three day pass was actually a 72 hour pass. I was wrong. Also, when you are getting on the train they are pretty lax about checking your ticket. There are no turnstiles or gates to go through, you just hold out your ticket and the guy smiles and waves you past. Well, today when I was headed to the train station from my hostel, I had to take the metro. I had out my ticket, showed it to the guy at the station near the hostel, and was on my way to Keleti Station. But, and that’s a big but (figuratively not literally, well maybe the woman at the metro station did have a big butt, but I wasn't going to point that out) when I got off the metro and was walking to the exit, there was a group of metro officials checking the tickets of people exiting, the first I had seen this. Well I pulled out my ticket, showed it to the lady and was nearly through, until she looked at the date on my ticket, the very small fine print date. Apparently, what I thought was a valid ticket, was not, so her supervisor approached and demanded I pay the 6000 forint fine. Well I certainly didn't have that much money on me since I certainly didn't need forints in Vienna. He walked with me all the way to the ATM at the train station so I could withdraw the cash to cover the fine. Let me remind you 3000 forints is a nice sized meal for me, so because I was without a valid ticket I had to sacrifice two days of good food. Guess it will be another day of stale bread smeared in Nutella. The guy was nice, but it was just his job to enforce the rules, so I knew arguing to him would make no difference. So heed my warning... take a tram instead of the metro in Budapest, no people monitoring the validity of tickets on the trams. It might be slower, but if you are discreet, it is free.