Day Fifty - Jul 10, 2012

The morning started especially early for Brian, who had misread a date for our night train to Switzerland tomorrow. We now actually have a reservation on the train tonight, a room reservation in Vienna tonight, and nothing waiting for us in Switzerland tomorrow night. At 7:20 Brian hoofed it over to Praterstern station and hit the OBB counter for some help. Bad news all around. Changes are free, if they can match your connections. They cannot. No couchettes (those fun train bunk beds) available at all tomorrow, which means we paid to switch from beds tonight to seats tomorrow night . What can you do? The good news is that because we are in Vienna another night we have a chance to see Montery Pop (the 1968 D.A. Pennebaker concert documentary) at the Vienna Film Festival. The Film Festival came highly recommended by our apartment "host", takes place on an enormous screen in front of city hall (Rathaus) in the open air, and is free. So our day restarted a little later with a trip to the Schonbrunn Palace, a Habsburg summer palace that has been restored with it's original furnishing such that tourists can walk through forty of its rooms and see how the other half lived in the 17th and 18th centuries. Worry not, it turns out they lived very well. It was a fascinating display of ostentatious wealth. Brian is feeling a little sickly, so we caught some lunch at a little Austrian cafe on a back street and then the metro home for the afternoon. After a good nap, we watched the afternoon thunderstorm, wondering a little about an outdoor film festival this evening. By the time we'd finished a little dinner the rain had stopped and we caught the metro to Rathausplatz. We settled into a couple of seats in the bleachers and (in good "it could rain any minute" Alaskan summer weather) we enjoyed a couple of great movies on the biggest screen we've ever seen, in front of a city hall building that looked like a palace. It rained a little once which cleared the weak in the crowd, but otherwise only dramatic skies rolled overhead. The double bill, Monterey Pop and Ray Charles at Montreaux, were awesome and we caught the metro back to our flat around midnight.