Sept 22, 2019 – Vienna, Austria
I woke up really late and totally cross with myself… Guess I got off the wrong side of the bed. I sleepily made Pongal and had a long discussion with Krishnan on what I think he should be doing in the kitchen :):):). Since we had the 24-hour ticket from yesterday, we decided to quickly visit the Lilliputbahn at Praterstern.
While walking towards the Metro station, we found the Backerei Arena open and bought three bureks. I asked the girl at the counter what the filling were and she didn’t understand the word “filling”. When I saw a small piece of potato I pointed to that burek and said “potato?”, she smiled and said potato, then pointed to the next one saying spinach and the third one saying cheese ! Communication has to be receiver-oriented… language hardly matters. So we happily bought the three bureks and got onto the train.
Reached Praterstern station and used the google maps to figure out where the Lilliputbahn was. As we walked through the GaborStraße we realized that this was a massive amusement park. We found the Lilliputbahn’s HBF and paid 5 Euros each for two tickets and did the 25 minute joy ride like kids. I think we should do something similar in the Delhi Rail Museum – we have such a rich railways history !. Infact I think every major city must have these kind of hop-on hop-off heritage trains/trams to showcase the major attractions.
The Lillipubahn went through a green mini forest area after Hauptallee and then through Rotunda and came back to the HBF through the stadium. Truly a joy ride. We weren’t interested in the other adventure rides so we walked back to the Praterstern station.
When we looked at the U4 route map, we realized we could easily visit the Schonbrunn Palace as the U4 had a dedicated station for it. We did just that and since it was a slightly longish ride, we polished off the cheese burek. We reached the Schonbrunn Palace by 2.30 and decided to spend about 15 to 20 minutes taking pictures. It’s a beautiful palace but we have seen several palaces so didn’t want to do the tour.
Read more about the Schonbrunn palace here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schönbrunn_Palace.
Its truly a majestic structure and no wonder the most visited tourist destination in Vienna.
We got back onto the U4 for our ride back to Friedensbrucke by 2.55 pm as our 24 hour ticket would expire by 3.30 pm. When we got off the station, we saw an advert for Billa at Franz Josefhof that was open on all days. Krishnan had his call with Dhanush at 4 pm, but we thought we could just try and see if we could quickly get to this Billa and turned right as we got out of the station. We walked a few metres and I put on the google map … it showed 1.1 miles to the nearest Billa so we just turned back and got back to the Airbnb. Post the call with Dhanush, we watched the “Howdy Modi” event from start to finish and were thrilled with the reception Mr. Modi got at Houston.
Once Modiji’s speech was done, we got out for a short walk and went to both ends of the Wallensteinstrasse. When we got to the Friedensbrucke station, we decided to walk across and just see if we do find the Billa store. And within 350 metres we saw the yellow Billa signboard on a building that was called FranzJosefHof … Google maps never showed this place, it kept showing us Franz Josef Kai which is near Schwedenplatz.
In life too we often give up too soon :). We went into Billa and bought whatever we required. We had to buy a bag as well since we had walked out without one. A lady at the billing counter smiled at me and said she loves the “bindi”. I told her, I had just walked out of the house with no intention of coming to Billa, otherwise I would have given her a packet of bindis as I always have them in my bag.
What an interesting day !