Vienna is incredibly beautiful and baroque. I am always
overwhelmed by how old the buildings are in Europe. It’s hard for me to
comprehend that these streets have been walked by people for hundreds of years
and the ornate baroque buildings were built hundreds of years ago too. One of
the first places I went in Vienna was the Schonbrun Palace and it was so
impressive. The gardens were vast and extremely manicured. It was really fun to
walk through them and see all the local people jogging through the gardens. The
castle was so ornate inside, it was very luxurious and beautiful, but again it
is hard for me to really comprehend that someone once lived there. It was cool
to imagine that Maria Theresia lived there and I was walking through the same
hallways she once walked.
The atmosphere here is very relaxed. I see people taking
long lunches outside chatting, drinking, and smoking. It’s really nice to see a
different pace of life here than in Seattle; I like it. It’s nice that people
here able to take a long lunch and relax, I find that people in Seattle are
very focused on work. Here in Vienna there seems to be a better work life balance.
I always see newspaper articles about Europe’s declining
birth rate and how most European couples are choosing not to have children.
However, this statistic does not hold true for Vienna! I have seen many women
with young children and pregnant women in the subway and all over the city
center. There are many families here. I’ve seen more women with babies in
Vienna than I have ever seen in Seattle. It’s nice to see all the mothers with
their children and hearing young children speak German is really cute.
As with the rest of Europe many people smoke cigarettes
here. I am very surprised by the amount of places that let people smoke inside.
I’ve also seen a surprising number of people smoking with their children or
even young infants with them. It does not seem very healthy.
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