Useless to you, but great for me.

I found a really good blog about restaurants!! I'm looking forward to finding really good burger places and Mexican restaurants.. *drool* Doesn't look like I'll be losing weight in Europe after all!

http://www.chew.hu/

Pictures from Vienna

Hello! It's been a while. In this past couple of weeks I've been going to class, going shopping, partying, cooking, spending time with my roommate, chatting online with Alex, and I also spent a weekend in Szeged which is a city in southern Hungary. Anyway, before I post pictures of my daily life in Budapest, let me finish updating everyone on my previous travels. Today's pictures are of when my mom and I went to Vienna, Austria.

The streets of Vienna. Vienna was one of my more favorite cities we visited to. It was beautiful, but in the wealthy and clean kind of way, especially with all the palaces, extravegant buildings, museums, gardens, and etc. It seemed like a touristy kind of city for rich and "refined" people, but it's a beautiful city nontheless.

They have really mini Zenia-sized cars in Vienna.

Where do they fit their groceries?

Unfortunately, we're in Europe during the time where snow just ended and spring is still a while away. Ths means that all the gardens look scary and bare. I think this is Volksgarten, which is a huge park/garden and I imagine it to be incredibly beautiful during the summer. I don't know what those things are that they wrapped up, but I think it's to protect them from the rain? A lot of things seemed to be wrapped up like that in Vienna.

I don't know what this is, but it's a building in the garden.

Mr. Mozart himself.

I made my mom take this picture because I thought it was funny.

We ended up going to the music museum and weaponry museum and it was AWESOME. The picture is not the music/weaponry museum.. but the natural history museum I think. Anyway, it was really cool to see the original instruments that great composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Hayden, and etc. played. They also had the weirdest instruments from the 15th century. Can you believe it, they had portable pianos back then. And then the weaponry one had freaking old gun sets, weird armor such as ones shaped like women's dresses, and lots of scary odd-shaped knives. I couldn't take a pictures though because it seems they have guards in every corner. I tried to sneak one of this armor with knives on it and it came out blurry.

We got to visit and tour the Habsburg family's summer home, Schonbrunn Palace. It has 1441 rooms for Maria Theresa and her 16 kids and all their sets of servants. So as you can imagine, the rooms looked spectacular (no photography allowed). Very, very extravegant. It was cool to see some rooms that were very "east meets west" since Maria Theresa was a big fan of Asian art she would incorporate a bunch of Chinese porcelain and art into the whole decor of some rooms.

This is one of the sides of the square.. That's where all the servants would stay.

This is part of their garden... Again, it's bare and gloomy because it's not spring/summer yet. There's also a garden maze off on the side where you can run around in your oversized dress and flirt with cute princes of other nations.

And we finished the night with some dessert at Cafe Sacher, which is supposed to be home to the world's most famous Sacher Torte (it's in the middle). It tasted like a rich chocolate cake with some fruitiness and spices to it.

More Pictures

Here are some more pictures from when we were traveling in Budapest.

After we went to the Basilica, we kept walking northwards towards the Parliament. This is me trying to pose like the guy on the bridge..

This is my mom in front of the Parliament.

It has really nice architecture. I don't quite know the style (baroque?), but if you see more of my Hungary pictures you'll realize that there are so many different types of styles and eras of architecture throughout the city. It's really, really cool. Basically, I was told it's because there would always be buildings destroyed through wars and they'd build new ones in that particular era.

In front of something else, I don't really know.

We went on a tour the next day and they took us to one of the highest points in Budapest where we could get a panoramic view. Hahahaha, I accidentally included that guy stretching in the picture.

The tour also took us to a Castle in Buda (Budapest = Buda on one side of the Danube and Pest on the other... The other pictures were in Pest). Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of Buda's Castle, but this is the view from it. What's cool about Buda's Castle, is that there's a bunch of caves underneath it. I hear there are a lot of caves to visit in Budapest. Hopefully I'll get to visit next time.

This is the night view.

To those that don't know (i.e. Terrance), I'm studying business abroad in Budapest as an exchange student. The orientation was yesterday. At night we got to meet other international students and they had an old Hungarian folk dance performance for us. It was REALLY COOL! Unfortunately, I didn't bring my camera because I didn't want to risk getting it mugged on the walk back home. Basically, there was a lot of slapping the knees and stopping. But it was cool.