Vienna Walking Tour with Amy and Amanda

We took Amy and Amanda on a walking tour of Vienna one day. It is the best way to see all of Vienna’s many beautiful sights, because Vienna really is a “small” big city.

We started at Karlsplatz, with the beautiful church there.

Inside the Karlsplatz church, you can go up an elevator to a platform just below the dome. Then you get to climb some scary scalfoding that climbs up all the way into the cupola. It is amazing to see the dome of the church with all its beautiful paintings so closeup. At the top I showed Amy and Amanda where various different sights in the city are located. We ended up walking to many of the sights this day.

After the church it was of course time to go to the Naschmarkt and buy Kebaps. Amanda only looks mad in this picture because she hasn’t tried hers yet, you can’t be sad after you eat a yummy kebap!

There’s a happy “I love kebaps!” face!

Here we are walking along the Graben, a famous shopping street in Vienna.

I am afraid I don’t know the name of this church, we stepped into quite a few different little churches as we walked the city. I loved the ceiling in this one though. I think this one was located near Freyung.

While we were waiting for the Easter markets to open up we walked over to the Votivekirche, which has beautiful stained glass inside. Although I think the highlight of this church is the large ad they hung on the scaffolding on the outside!

We didn’t have our nice camera, so I don’t have many great pics of the inside, but I loved this one where the sunlight streaming through the stained glass made rainbows all over the walls of the church.

There is a playground just outside the church that we stopped to play at so the kids could run around for a little while. As you can see, they both LOVE swings.

Oliver is going through a fun new phase where he won’t go down the slide by himself, but he had a great time going down with Amy and Amanda.

I think Amy and Amanda enjoyed playing at the park too!

On our way back to the Easter market, we saw a car crash into a Strassenbahn! No way, I have NEVER seen that before! We decided we should invite Amy and Amanda more often, we see such interesting things when out walking with them. We felt bad for all the people on the Strassenbahn who had to get off and find another way to get wherever they were headed… Sad for the guy’s car too, but you really have to pay attention when driving in Vienna because the buses and Strassenbahns aren’t going to stop for you!!!!

We went to the beautiful market at Freyung. Amanda bought one of these crazy creme filled ice cream cones. Yum, sugar!

They had a stand where little kids could paint styrofoam easter eggs for free. Oliver and Elora really enjoyed being able to paint, and only got a little paint on their clothes…

Elora liked it so much, that we bought a little kit they were selling that included real egg shells, paints, and feathers to decorate the eggs with. Super cute.

Here we all are in front of the eggs! I always get scared to walk through this market, it would be just my luck to trip and crush some eggs or something.

This awesome band played while we were there. The kids loved it and danced the whole time. We especially like the guy on the left playing the weird “symphony on a stick” instrument. No idea when it is really called, but it had a variety of different instruments that could be played with either a drumstick, or by banging the stick on the ground.

Lots of eggs!

There was another market nearby that was mostly unusual antiques or crafts and artwork.

The tire horse swing was our favorite item at the market!

We included this pic just because I have never seen Oliver make a cheesy smile like that before or since this pic! So funny.

As we walked around and window shopped we wondered what was so special about this toaster that it should cost 600 Euro! That better make bacon and eggs to go with my toast!

We have a friend who works at a sushi stand, so for lunch we went by and Chris got to try his first sushi! He was pretty brave and tried a couple kinds of raw fish as well as the more tame avocado and cucumber rolls. I will admit I don’t like the raw fish ones, I just ate the cucumber and avocado ones…

Here we are in front of the Rathaus! (city hall)

And on the other side of the street, the Burgtheater.

Here is the Parliament building, which is absolutely beautiful. We realized we haven’t really just walked around the city and taken nice photos of a lot of the buildings. Sad that we have neglected this… One of these days we’ll get a babysitter and go out for some good pics of Vienna to show off.

Of course we had to stop by the living statue. This one was very nice and friendly to Elora, and she was SO happy to take a pic with him.

The Hofburg – Imperial Palace.

Then back to the Graben for gelato at Zanoni and Zanoni’s. So yummy. By now the kids were totally done walking, so we headed home to paint our Easter Egg kit. Now we have beautiful kid creation eggs to hang up on our egg tree at home!