From Budapest, we traveled by bus across Hungary to Vienna, where we spent the last few remaining days of our tour.
Immediately upon our arrival in Vienna, we went on a walking tour of the city to see the sites: The Albertina, Hofburg Imperial Palace, State Opera House, Heldenplatz, the Demel pastry shop, St. Peters Church, Mozart's home-turned-museum, the Spainish Riding School, the training grounds of the famous Lipizzan horses, and St. Stephen's Cathedral.
After a brief one hour break during which we had to not only eat dinner, but change and get ready for the Viennese Opera, we went to see The Barber of Seville. They still take the opera extremely seriously in Vienna, and dress up more than you'd think...we saw a couple of women in ball gowns while we were there. It was really quite a good opera, though perhaps not the best opera I've ever seen (and I haven't really seen THAT many), but I'm sure it would have been a good deal better if we could have seen more than half of the stage and heard everything that was being sung. DIS bought us the cheapest seats in the house, in the top seated row, in the corners of the opera house, so those of us who were right in the corner had to sort of crane our necks out and lean over the railing to see what was going on: a precarious and uncomfortable position.
After the opera was over, a bunch of us decided to hit the Viennese Casino, since we were already dressed up enough and our guide earlier had told us a way to make back all of our money. "You can't lose!" she told us.
WRONG. You can lose. We lost a lot. Given, we did walk into the wrong casino, so there were no roulette tables like our guide had talked about, just blackjack and arcades. With the exception of Peter, who made back all but one euro, we all lost everything we'd put down, including euro we had been given as "first-timers" at the casino.
Upon leaving, we ran into a group of DIS students looking for a bar, which at that point, was our goal as well. So we traveled around Vienna with them, looking for a swinging bar that was affordable and where the dress code wasn't too strict for some of the boys to get in (yes-the dress codes for bars are worse than the dress codes at the Opera and the Casino). We ended up at some new bar, that was supposedly having an opening night party - we made up almost the entire crowd there. However, they had cheap drinks and I think everyone involved had a wonderful time, until the early hours of the morning.
Hillevi and I decided that since we'd attended every lecture during the tour thus far, we deserved to miss the last one, which, according to our guide book, was supposed to be on economics, a subject neither of us cared anything at all about.
So, we slept in, took the metro to Schonbrunn, and met up with the group for lunch at Cafe Gloriette. After a rousing meal with the other folks who skipped the economics lecture, we went on to Schonbrunn's Tiergarten, or zoo. We spent a good deal of time looking for the zoo's prestigious Panda pair, Yang Yang and Long Hui, traveling through the cats, rhinos, and simulated Amazon Rainforest to find them.
I ended up leaving the park with some boys in our group, having missed the bus because of all the searching for Pandas, and ended up visiting The Albertina to see the Pablo Picasso exhibit they were showing. I spent most of the evening with them, having 'traditional' Tapas food and looking for an open bar that was also affordable, finding none, and heading home relatively earlier than we'd hoped.
The next morning we went to the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien for a guided tour. It was largely boring. I was disappointed. We then went to the cafe in the Museum of Modern Art to "analyze" the tour and share one last meal before we all went our seperate ways. It was almost touching...DIS bought us one last glass of wine.
Instead of returning to the hotel to take the bus back to Copenhagen, I caught a taxi to the Western train station to go back to Budapest for a few days and catch up with more K people.


A number of exceedingly brilliant things were said during the course of the DIS ECH study tour (most of them by our beloved raspy-voiced member), and I'm catalogueing them here for my own personal amusement:

"the past 24 hours hav ebeen the best 24 hours of my life!" please imagine this said multiple times, every hour of every day.
"oh, she's pregnant. I was wondering, like why is that model SO fat?"
"this one time, I took my boyfriend to one of my soroitiy parties, and he wanted to wear KHAKI PANTS. I just don't understand pleated khakis!"
"brown and black...you just can't wear that. I can't stand brown and black together. I like tan and black though, that's totally different. But brown is like navy."
"and then I threw up 3 times and a little in my mouth. but it was my birthday yesterday."
"but aren't people like wheapons?"
on potato pancakes: "I was like, Oh my god! I just ate that!"
"wait, the opera's not in English? Are there subtitles?"
On the Barber of Seville, which is in Italian: "but I didn't understand anything, because I think it was in like, German or something, so I just left."
"it's my birthday! Let's sing happy birthday again! Please, just one more time?"
On how far her chair was leaned back: "It's a free country. I can lean my chair back as far as I want."
"Oh my god, they have shwarma here? Why isn't it just called shwarma? What's a kebap?"
In Statue Park, Budapest: "Let's hump the statues! Someone take a picture of me humping the statue!"
"Maybe we should be...I dunno, more respectful?"
"No, no, humping is funny. Humping is always funny!"
On leaving someone at the zoo, with the tour leaders: "We had to leave her at the zoo because she was being really loud and self-centered."