Visiting Vienna with very little, or no, money. How is it?

When my friend and colleague from the master’s degree Eliane told me “What’s up, we’re going on a trip to Prague?” I didn’t think twice and said yes. But when we wanted to buy tickets for Prague the low prices had sold out, so we made a slight change of plans: we would still visit Eastern Europe but we would arrive in the capital of Slovakia and do a student tour of Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava. Of course, all this in a “studhungry” plan 😀 since our budget was not very big, but even so we wanted to take advantage of the days off from our class periods. So today I am going to tell you how we traveled to Vienna with almost no money and still enjoyed it.

Flying to Bratislava

We bought tickets for 38 euros round trip with RyanAir and started the flight. When I got on the plane and saw the windows, I felt a certain apprehension, since a friend who studies Aerospace Engineering had told me days before that such square windows were not safe. Oops, I tried to forget the conversation because, being on the plane, what can you do? (spoiler: nothing happened).

Arriving in Vienna

Arriving in Bratislava and we took a bus to Vienna (the distance between the two places is like 50 km). Once in Vienna we took the subway to get to our lodging place.

And when we got out of the subway we had to deal with the gale and rain that greeted us upon arrival. In those conditions, we had to find our hostel and we started to see the city. Ordinary things attracted a lot of attention.

Get your flight to Austria at the best price

After leaving our backpacks, we went to dinner because we were already hungry, but, this trip to Vienna was low, very low budget since there was little money available 😀 . So we went to McDonalds for dinner 🙁 the nice part of my going to the burger place was that I could order in English but I could also say Danke (thank you) always 🙂 I used my poor German vocabulary and I was happy.

Our visit to Vienna in one day and with little money

We prayed to the sky that it would not rain like the day before (it was very difficult to walk or take photos) and it seems that the clouds heard us. So the sky was gray but no rain so let’s go visit.

Schonbrunn Palace

Our first stop was Empress Sissi’s palace, also known as the Viennese Versailles. It is one of the main tourist attractions of the city, you can enter the entire exterior part for FREE, so we saw the buildings from the outside and the gardens, which unfortunately, being winter, were not at their best.

Oh and we saw a couple of ducks. Observing them, I realized that in birds the male is always prettier (the drake has a green head, the hen is insipid, all brown). We climbed a mini hill and we found some statues of “mermen” or sea horses.

The Vienna subway

Leaving the palace we took the subway, it was curious to meet Casper in a commercial on the street, but he seemed dressed up like from the times of Sissi, different from what we are used to.

We got to take the subway and, there is not much to say, it arrives EXACTLY at the time that is written, no more no less. Absolute punctuality. We are in Austria. We also had the opportunity to see the trams although we did not take them, they looked quite modern.

Amazing things in Vienna

Something unlikely. Look how the newspaper is sold:

They trust that you will only take one newspaper. Even more, they trust you to leave the coin. They trust you won’t steal the other newspapers because look this is a simple bag that can be opened.

We continued on our way, and we found some bicycles in the middle of the street without chains or anything. “WHAT?” I couldn’t help but be impressed and think that they were shouting “STEAL ME”. But of course, in Vienna no one was going to steal them, if it wasn’t like that they wouldn’t have left them like that.

And they give away bags for dog poop. Note: in 2007 seeing these things was a great novelty for me, and later I realized that it is done in many European countries.

Our meals

Anyway, the gastronomic discovery in Vienna would be for another occasion, we went with very little money so we ate hamburgers again. Of course, I had the luxury of having a Starbucks (one of the things that reminded me of my home, which I already missed after so many months of being on the other side of the pond).

Walking downtown

And there goes what we look at as we walk through the center. We saw a clown and horses ready to pull the carriages, they had somewhat sad looks. We could also see the old buildings and shops, there were many chocolate shops

At that we arrived at a place where there was a huge skating rink, everyone had a lot of fun and since we had walked a lot we decided to stay a while watching people skate. We also saw the surroundings.

The Parliament

While walking we found the Parliament building, we didn’t stop there much and we didn’t even try to enter (so no idea if they let you visit it). The building, as you can see, is in a marked Greek style.

See the opera in Vienna paying very little money

And to close the night Eliane had already told me before coming that you could buy very cheap tickets for the Opera. Paying 3 euros or something like that, of course, if they were bought at the last moment. So after finding out that the play of the day was Madama Butterfly, we went to the opera to buy tickets and then the show began:

First we met a reseller who wanted to lead us down the garden path, he wanted to sell us two tickets for 400 euros (but thus telling us “Oh these are the last ones left” and we told him “hmm we were looking for cheaper tickets”.

The same when another saleswoman approached us, she told us “No for these shows there are no tickets of that type but I offer you this other show. Oh, are you students? You are in luck, you pay only 25 euros and blah blah blah” And we “mmm yes yes we will think about it”.

Then we ran into another guy who was offering tickets to that show too but he made up that the cheap opera tickets were all sold out.

As you can see there was a discrepancy between all of them, so we took on the task of really finding out if there were cheap tickets for the opera or not. When searching and searching suddenly my friend saw a hidden door in the opera building, with a tiny sign that said “Standing” or something like that and so we entered. There was a small queue. It turned out that it was the row of cheap tickets we were looking for. Oh the joy! And those vendors who wanted to rip us off. So in the end we succeeded and we saw madama butterfly. Standing up throughout the whole play but happy (and I did end up very tired, this I can’t deny).

Dinner for a tight budget

At the end of the play we were exhausted, so from there we went to the hostel to cook some succulent instant soups (there was a kitchen in the hostel). That was one of the downsides of visiting Vienna with no money, fancy dinners were for later on.

In conclusion

Very nice Vienna, very clean. They had noise indicators at the pedestrian traffic lights for the blind (something that is not seen in all cities), the Austrians were very friendly. If I couldn’t speak German they spoke English and I saw that is a city that even with a, very, low budget is possible to visit it and say “I visited Vienna with no money (a very little)”

The trio tour:

• Vienna
• Budapest
• Bratislava

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