Final day in Vienna. In the morning I went out with Mexican guy from the previous night and we got breakfast. We went back to the hostel and agreed to meet up again that night. I looked into the palace again, but found that all the visiting options were either very expensive private tours or fairly limited, but still rather expensive, tours of just specific parts of the building. I decided it wasn't worth it and went out with my Australian roommate to see the Danube. It's a huge river and the part in Vienna is bisected by an extremely long and thin island. Aussie's mind was blown when he saw the north half of the river and remarked that he'd never seen anything so big, without realizing that this was only one half of things. It is pretty huge and it's easy to see why it was such a significant trading artery. The park on the island is pleasant but not that exciting, to be totally honest. From here I walked through a few other parks and back through the city center, since I'd somewhat skirted the periphery but not really seen too much of the core. The core is very fancy and seems to be where they have all their Christmas stuff, since the lights were already going up. Christmas apparently comes early in Vienna.

In the evening I spent a little time in the common areas of the hostel before meeting back up with Mexican guy and his Norwegian friend. Norwegian was an American Literature student and absolutely adored all the books that I reluctantly read for high school. I feel as though he had an unusually sympathetic perspective on American culture and media, since most people in Europe tend to look rather scornfully on the US without really understanding what life is like there. They left to catch a train and I went back to the hostel where I spent a little more time with some people in the common room. I saw that Kiwi from a few nights ago and she vented for a while about the annoying English guy who has apparently continued to follow her around being annoying. She seems to have based her personality off Marvin the Paranoid Android and it was very hard to tell when she was being genuine vs sarcastic about her view of the world.

I had high expectations for Vienna, and honestly I can't say it delivered. It's very pretty and seems like it would be a nice place to live, but it lacks character and charm. It really seems like a German city in a lot ways, so there isn't much distinctive Austrian identity, and the nice parts of town are crowded by buildings that look entirely as though they're all banks or stock exchanges. The architecture lacks diversity and personality, with nearly everything being 5 story white blocks which are almost indistinguishable from one another. The nightlife seems uninteresting and there's generally a lack of energy to the atmosphere of the place. It's true that there are a lot of things that I could've done and didn't, and it's certainly true that I didn't see the best of the city in some ways. But I also barely saw anything in Stockholm and that didn't stop me from loving it - the city itself is fascinating and doesn't need to rely on the expensive attractions within to be worth seeing. Again, Vienna is an extremely nice city - it's safe and clean, the metro is great, there are nice parks, and it's actually pretty affordable. But as a tourist those things don't matter quite the same way they would otherwise.

I'm typing this from my hostel in Bratislava right before going out to explore. I think just one night here - there's a general consensus that it's not an especially exciting city, though I've been slightly surprised by how much character was in the old town as I walked here from the bus stop. My next stop was intended to be Budapest, a city I think will be super cool. Miriam (German from Ljubljana) is also there and it would be cool to see her again. That said, I have a lot of Interrail days left to use in the next 2.5 weeks, and I've been to every Central European county except Czechia. Previously I had dismissed this because I don't want to go all the way up to Prague and then have to come back, but now I'm considering a stop in Brno which is much closer. I'm tempted to go Brno to Krakow, but then it's like 10 hours of train to get from Krakow back to Budapest as opposed to about 4 hours from here (I really don't know how that's possible since the distances aren't so different). I could just go to Brno and then go back to Budapest from there since it's only 1.5 hours from here, but I don't know if it's worthwhile to retread all that ground just to see one city in Czechia that I'm not especially interested in. If I don't get value out of these Interrail days soon it might be hard to, particularly since I don't think it'll work in Albania or Kosovo at all, and the Balkans are generally not well interconnected with one another by rail so I may begin relying on busses more. Not sure what to do so I'll ask around,