Yesterday, our U-Bahn 72 hour pass expired at 11am, so we decided to get up “early” (meaning around 9) and take advantage of the end of the pass. We left the dorms around 10 for Praterstern station. We took the train to Schwedenplatz because there is a photo booth in the station that we used to get our pictures for our visas. Because we were already there, we decided to explore the area near the station. We just walked around the city, not really looking for anything. Almost everything in Vienna is closed on Sundays, but we happened upon Römermuseum Wien, which is a branch of the Vienna Museum that focuses on the history of Vienna in Roman times. The museum was pretty cool, relatively small but the basement had remnants of the original Roman-built structures on the land which was really cool to see.
We left the museum just before noon and found a mass of people standing outside with their cameras out. We had stumbled upon the Anker Clock, which was super cool. “ It forms a bridge between the two parts of the Anker Insurance Company‘s building. In the course of 12 hours, twelve historical figures or pairs of figures move across the bridge. Every day at noon, all of the figures parade, each accompanied by music from its era.” We walked outside at exactly the right time and got to see the entire parade of figures move across the bridge.
We continued exploring for a while after that and took a walk around Stadtpark, which is a large park in the first district that has statues of famous Viennese artists, writers, and composers. After a lap around the park, we headed to the nearest U-Bahn station to head back to Praterstern for lunch and then back to the dorms. We both ended up accidentally napping for nearly three hours, which made it pretty hard to fall asleep last night. We spent the rest of the evening getting all of our stuff ready for our visa applications and making sure we had everything we needed.