Central Europe: Day 7 (Vienna / Prague)

Today was our last day in Vienna, and our first evening in Prague!

We ate breakfast at the beautiful Demel, the grande dame of Viennese pastry. We picked out a chocolate torte and a lemon tart from the case and got a seat by the maker's table in the back.

Next stop was down the street at the Albertina Museum, a sort of combo of state rooms and art museum. There was a great collection of impressionists at the time, and we got to see another Dürer bunny outside:

And, of course, the real thing was at the museum - Albrecht Dürer's original bunny painting! 

The brushwork on him was amazing. In the gift shop afterward, I got a little pencil case with him on it. I put my scissors and crochet hooks in there for safe keeping! Perfect for this bunny mama.

We were almost done with the museum when I saw someone I hadn't seen in 14 years - Gretl, the administrator at the college in Salzburg where I studied abroad! I knew she still lived in Salzburg, but she and her husband were in Vienna for the weekend celebrating their anniversary. I guess it's a pretty small world.

We went for beers and a light lunch at Zattl Gastgarten, a cute little biergarten in a courtyard in the city center. We both had beer; I had polenta and salad and Dave had pumpkin risotto. I think it was here that we leveled up our Austrian drinking badge on Untappd.

From there, it was a four-hour train ride (lots of knitting) to Prague, where we had a lot to do in short order.

This is probably my fault in planning, but here was the schedule:

• 7 p.m. Arrive in Prague
• Hurry to race packet pickup
• 8 p.m. Race packet pickup closes
• Drop off stuff at hotel
• 8:30 p.m. Dinner reservations

So you can see the problem here. Our phones didn't work, we didn't know how to get to the Running Mall to pick up our packets, and we had to do all of it quickly to make dinner by 8:30.

In the end, we made it fairly close to the Running Mall and some very nice people helped us get the rest of the way there. We picked up our race packets and took the street tram down to our hotel, which was near the restaurant, but we still had to check in and everything. We ended up being a little late to dinner, but the view was worth it:

Dinner was at Villa Richter, a fancy terraced restaurant on a well-placed hill in Prague. We both picked meals off of the Czech specials menu: Dave had the beef tenderloin, a Pilsner Urquell (more on that later), and a red wine grown from grapes on the premises; I had the duck leg with potato and cabbage, also with the house red.

So, you could say that the first evening in Prague was a little crazy, and I was worried we had made a mistake by putting it on our itinerary. In the end, we figured out how to get our phones to work, and everything was easier the next day and beyond.