Why My Kids Love Vienna
Last month we were lucky enough to travel to Vienna, Austria. I honestly wasn’t too excited to visit Vienna, I’m not the type of “traveler” that enjoys seeing things that every American comes to Europe to see. (Make sense?) I like to be the person telling the stories of the “unknown land” I guess that’s one reason why I loved Bosnia so much, it’s not a big American tourist spot, and it makes telling my traveler stories that much better.
We arrived in Vienna, after a short 3-hour drive from Salzburg. It was a quick and easy drive when we arrived Tyler and I were SHOCKED at how large Vienna is. It’s HUGE! I guess I had it in my mind that it wasn’t much bigger than Ljublijana since people I’ve spoken with compared it to the “look” of Ljubljana, and I guess somehow I also imagined the same size as Ljubljana which is not the case at all!
We arrived in the afternoon and decided that we would explore the city, the boys had been riding in the car all day and needed to get out and get some fresh air. From our hotel, we could walk to Prater Amusement Park. If you’ve ever looked up about Vienna, Prater is one of the first attractions that pop up, because it’s HUGE, and sooooooo much fun!!! The boys, including Tyler had a BLAST! They rode rides till they were sick! It was a great place to run off energy and have lots of fun! You pay for the ride too, which was great and almost all rides were about 2 Euro The bigger rides were around 4 Euro, cheap fun!
The next day we woke up and went to the Haus Des Meeres. Haus Des Meeres is a huge indoor aquarium and reptile zoo. This place is on my short list of favorite zoos and we’ve been to a lot of zoos! I’m almost positive that this zoo has almost every kind of snake on earth! I was so surprised at how many snakes they had. Another thing that took us by surprise was they have a room full of monkeys that are just running free! The boys thought this was the coolest thing on earth! You aren’t supposed to touch them however they are super friendly and seek attention big time!
The aquarium had lots of cute details, if you look at the picture above the monkey is standing on a tube, that tube goes all the way around the aquarium and it’s a HUGE ant farm! You can see the little ants carrying leaves if you look very closely!
Here’s a better ant picture
The boys were a big fan of the water tunnels, they had two crawl through tunnels and one big tunnel that you walk through. Heath’s face says it all!!!
Next stop lunch on the roof of the aquarium! What an AMAZING view! Great place to take pictures too!
We then decided to hop over to the big market in Vienna! I love going to the city markets, it’s the best place to learn about the culture, find unique items and to people watch! I’ll also add this market had the BEST sushi! It’s very hard to find good sushi in Europe, at least to my liking and Vienna’s sushi was AMAZING and so many choices at that!
The market is called Naschmarket it has tons of restaurants, produce, spices, and beer! It’s a great place to hang out, and eat! I highly recommend visiting.
That’s about all we could squeeze into our one day in Vienna, Austria stay tuned for our next stop Bratislava, Slovakia. You’re going to want to read about that city, it’s one of my new favorites!!