Aaron- Vienna

Took a trip to Vienna last weekend with the gang. It was pretty stellar. Three (George,Mara,me) of us tried couchsurfing with this guy named Chris (for those not familiar, there is a couchsurfing website where you find people who have an open couch/bed/whatever and contact them and work out if you can stay with them whenever you travel somewhere else. It's a good way to meet new people, and you don't have to pay for a hostel!) who lived in an apartment complex (fun fact- Chris told us the building we were staying in was where the first porn movie was filmed. The more you know...) with four other roommates. He and his roommates were all super chill and friendly which was good because I was a little nervous about staying with a bunch of random people.

When we first arrived they welcomed us in and we chatted for a bit and Chris and his friends showed us around the city. That weekend there was a big music festival/conference thing called Waves going on which was a three day festival where during the day there are a bunch of conferences and discussions on music, DJing, etc and at night bands would play across several venues. They had a whole bunch of artists that I didn't know but there where some like CSS (they did the music is my boyfriend song for Apple alongtime ago), Au Revoir Simone, and Mum that rang a couple bells. The cool thing about the festival is that there is a channel (basically a mini-river) that runs through Vienna and all along this channel there are a bunch of docked boat venues where most of the bands/artist played. We ended up watching a guitar/singer due for a little bit in a coffee shop and then made are way to the Danube channel where we went on one of these boats for a little. The bands were decent (you were supposed to have pass to get in, but there were not many people at these shows so we got in without one) but the coffeehouse and boat were pretty good looking. It seems to be a big thing to have concerts on boats in Europe; in Budapest one of the big venues, A38 club, is on a pretty big boat too. Chris and his girfriend were working at the festival and the following day they worked on a boat that was part of the festival which started in Vienna and ended up in Bratislava (the capital of Slovakia) which I thought was pretty cool.

Anyway the next day the three of us did some exploring. We started off in the museum district and saw some cool sights and meandered our way around the city go in and out of tourist shops selling chocolate and trinkets. The city itself was really cool but my favorite part of Vienna is walking along the Danube channel because it is legal for people to graffiti the sides of the channel. You can walk a couple of miles and see a bunch of wild and crazy drawings. Here are some pics:

Later we somehow ended up in Vienna's version of Oktoberfest and found our way in to one of the beer tents or whatever they are called. There was a lot drunk people and singing in German. And it was pretty fun (despite not being the real Oktoberfest) and a little overwhelming too.

Next day i went and did some walking around the Vienna palace which is super-huge:

I mean the palace itself was only kind of big but the gardens around it were real spacious and there was a labyrinth you could walk around and even a zoo (supposed to be one of the oldest zoos around...). Anyway those are the young highlights.