7 Day School Trip part 1: Vienna

It is a very common phenomenon for high schools in Greece to organize a big school trip to celebrate the end of the last year of school. In the past most of the high schools were organizing these kind of trip inside Greece, but for some years it was popular to visit other countries. My generation was very lucky, so we had to choose between Rome, Prague-Vienna and Barcelona. As you can imagine, we decided to choose Prague -Vienna as our destination. In the following text, I will narrate my experience back from 2010.

So, it was March of 2010, three months before high school would be over for ever. The last year of high school in Greece is extremely demanding because from the end of May until the middle of June, students give their final exams so as to pass to the university. During that hard period, a 7-day trip outside our country was the best opportunity to clear our mind and take a break from the books and the pressure. Our class had about 100 students separated into 5 different parts, according to alphabetical order. Although we were many students, we were all friends and were looking forward for the departure day to arrive. We had started packing our stuff almost one week before the departure and during the breaks we were discussing about what we would bring with us and all the important details of the trip (of course the most important was the camera. Whoever had a camera, was "obliged" to bring it with him/her! ).

Aaand the big day had finally arrived! We were supposed to fly on Monday morning at 5. Some of the students were so anxious that had woken up from 2 am, while others decided not to sleep at all. I was constantly calling my friends on the phone to check if we had taken all the important stuff with us. At 4 am, we had a meeting outside our school yard, where 2 big buses were waiting for us to drive us to the airport. Many parents had joined there to goodbye their kids and tell them 100 times the typical parents' advice like "Be careful", "Don't go out without the others", "Call me twice a day" and bla bla bla. They were also talking with the professors that would come with us just to be sure that everything was ready.

We were ready to get into the buses and me with a friend sat at the front side of the bus. Behind us there were two of our best friends, Fani and Eleftheria. The moment the buses started heading to the airport, we had already taken our first photos to remember. When we got to the airport, we had to be a bit fast with giving our luggage for check-in because we were many people. After the check-in we had plenty of time to walk around the duty free, buy something or just drink a coffee.

The time of the departure had arrived. We were pushing each other to get into the plane first. Luckily, our seats were close to each other so we would all be close to each other during the flight. Some of the students had never travelled by plane and were very scared, but the teachers and the flight attendants were there to calm them down.

We fastened our seatbelts and the airplane took off. After half an hour, when we were at a normal height, we could unfasten our seatbelts and have a walk inside the plane to talk to each other and make fun of the people who were afraid. At some point, my friend Eleftheria had to visit the toilet, but when she got in and saw how small it was, she started being scared and I had to convince her that everything would be ok and that nothing would happen to her inside there. Then, the flight attendants finally came and asked us if we wanted to drink juice or coffee. I forgot to mention that during the plane we took also many many photos. Imagine, I had already more than 50 photos in my camera and it was still not even the first day of our trip.

The flight totally lasted two hours. They passed very quickly and at about 6 in the morning (due to the time difference with Germany) we landed in Munchen. The moment the plane touched the ground, the whole plane started clapping for the nice and non-turbulant flight that had just finished. During the time we were waiting to pick up our luggage, we were all trying to contact our parents and tell them that our flight was good and we had landed in Munchen.

Salzburg

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When we were ready with our luggage, we went inside the buses to drive to Salzburg, that was on our way to reach Vienna. The weather from Munchen through all our journey was foggy and ready to rain. We started our way to Salzburg and after only two hours we were there. Salzburg is a beautiful village with pedestrianized streets and small little houses. The weather there was sunny, so we could easily walk around the streets. In every corner there were vendors who were selling traditional Pretzels and we bought to try the taste and continue our walk around the village. There is a river that passes through the village and you can walk along it, or just find a bench and relax there. We decided to sit at the benches and take some photos.

At noon, we were hungry so we started looking for a place to eat. We found a very cozy little restaurant and decided to eat our lunch there. The menu mainly consisted of many kind of soups such as onion soup (not our favourite option! ). We didn't want to eat soup, so we ordered traditional German schnitzel. It was so tasty and we all agreed that it was a way better option than the soup. After our lunch we had to go back to our buses and continue the journey to our final destination for that day, Vienna.

The time of the travel until Vienna was 3 whole hours, so we had the time to rest during our way there, because we were very tired. We got to our hotel in Vienna late in the night and we had to wait for a long time at the reception, until we all had a room and keys for our rooms. My friends Fani, Eleftheria and Lina would share the same room while I would stay in another room with two other friends.

After we had some rest and took a shower, we went down to the hotel's restaurant to eat our dinner. During dinner, we had to decide what to do next. We were all so tired, and the time had passed, so it was worthless to go out and walk around the city because everything was closed. Instead, we stayed at the hotel and played cards, took more photos and were walking from room to room, talking to each other and playing games.

Scohnbrunn Palace

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The next morning, after we had slept a lot, we woke up early to start exploring the beautiful city of Vienna. We got into the buses and our guide started saying us the story of the city. He told us that we were heading to the most famous attraction of Vienna, the Scohnbrunn Palace, that is widely known as the palace of princess Sissy. The weather was sunny and the temperature was ideal to walk around without being annoyed from the cold. When we arrived to the palace, the view left us speechless! In front of us there was standing a huge building with numerous windows with golden details. In front of the palace, there were beautiful gardens and fountains, with benches to rest and take photos and also lots of grass and flowers, small and big statues, other buildings etc. We were so fascinated by the place that we couldn't stop taking pictures. And we had seen just the outside part of it.

The inside view of the palace was even more astonishing. Numerous bedrooms and bathrooms, everything with a golden pinch, used to be the house of princess city, and nowadays work as a museum for the tourists. Inside the bedroom of princess Sissy we saw also her portrait and tried to take as many photos as possible. For plenty of hours we were walking around the inside and outside part of the palace, to see as many things as possible. We also walked around the parks and the beautiful gardens. There were also along with us many tourists from all over the world that came there to visit the palace and you could see from their look that they were also quite fascinated.

After our long walks around the palace it was time to go and eat some lunch. It was noon and we were very hungry so we walked around the city center to find a restaurant and eat. After that we continued our tour around the city. Next, we decided to visit Mozart's house to take some photos of the outside view. Near the house we found a store that was selling souvenirs with Mozart's face on them. There were lots of different types of candies and chocolates inside the store, and the best selling were chocolates with liqueor inside. We bought lots of boxes as gifts for our families. I also bought some liqueors that had chocolate flavour and were just amazing!

Mozart's house.

After the shopping, we started heading back to the hotel to have some rest. On our way, we made a stop at a local supermarket to buy water, chips and beers. At the cashier, the customer asked to check our identity cards to see if we were over 18, so that we could buy the beers. Most of us were still 17, but luckily our friend Fani, had turned 18 some days ago, so she bought everything for us.

We turned back to the hotel, had some free hours to rest and started discussing about where we wanted to go in the night. We found a club that was playing nice music and decided to stay there. The entrance of the club looked like underground tunnels with lots of graffities on the walls. The staff was wearing colourful clothes and they were all wearing rollerblades on their feet. We started dancing or just talking to each other. Of course, we didn't forget to take many many photos to remember that night. We stayed at the club until late in the night and at some point our teachers told us that we had to leave because we had to wake up early the next morning and we didn't have enough hours to sleep.

The next morning we had planned to visit the museum of Natural History of Vienna. The museum was very beautiful from the outside and had a big garden and lots of statues that were representing animals. I can recall that we were all amused by a big elephant statue and took many photos with it.

One of the photos that we took with the elephant.

Inside the museum there were many different rooms with all the kinds of animals. Each room had different animal species. Some of the animals that are not under extinction, were alive but in safe places so that they wouldn't be dangerous because most of them were poisonous snakes or lizards. The rest of the animals were stuffed.

The corridors and the stairs of the museum were decorated with several photographs of animals from all over the world.At the entrance of the museum there was a huge statue that was representing a seal.

After we walked around the museum, we grabbed a sandwich at the canteen of the museum. Then, we had some free time so we decided to just walk around the streets of Vienna. We had a long walk at one of the main streets of the city, that was full of shops, restaurants and small malls. We bought some more souvenirs for our family and ourselves. At some point we realized that we were lost. We had to meet the rest of the group outside Saint Stephen's Church, so we used our basic German knowledge to ask for some information to find our way to the church. It was not so hard after all, so we found the meeting point and the rest of the group very soon.

The area around the church was very beautiful. Narrow pedestrianized streets, with traditional cafes and restaurants with traditional kitchen were the things that I can remember the most. We decided to sit at one of the cafeterias and drink a coffee while watching the square in front of Saint Stephen's church.

At about twilight we went back to our hotel, to have some rest and make our plans for our last day in Vienna and the next days in Prague. We also played some board games, so we didn't manage again to sleep early.

The next morning, our last day in Vienna, we went to Donauturm.Donauturm is a observation tower at the shores of the river Danube. The people there told us that it is the tallest building in Austria and one of the tallest buildings of the world. We got up into groups of people with the elevators until the top of the tower and we observed the amazing view of the city of Vienna. At the top of Donauturm there was a restaurant and a cafeteria, so we sat there to enjoy the view along with a cup of hot coffee. Near the windows, there were binoculars that we could use to observe easily the whole town. The most spectacular view was of the Danube river and the world΄s famous ferris wheel. We took numerous photos from every angle of the tower and we were lucky because we had the chance to see the amazing sunset from up there.

The view from the top of Donauturm

On Donauturm there was also a machine that could convert a coin of 5 cents into a souvenir. We just had to put the coin into the hole and pull the lever and then we had a coin with the Donauturm and the wheel.

After our long and tiring day, we went back to the hotel, picked up our luggage and went into the buses to continue to our next destination: the city of Prague.