A palace, royal carriages and lots of chocolate

Day four in Vienna. 

I'm chewing on a piece of Lindt chocolate filled with salty caramel cream as I'm writing about today. mmmm this stuff is divine!

I wasn't feeling 100% well this morning, feared that I might have caught a cold, so we decided to have a more relaxed day with only Schloss Schönbrunn planned to visit. It's a huge palace that was used as a summer residence by royalty and is easily approached with the metro U4.

Now, I have seen quite a few palaces and castles in my life so far, and this was impressive for being "only" a vacation home! But sadly, I became disappointed in many things at Schönbrunn. I've mentioned that Vienna is a very clean city, I've only seen a few cigarette stumps, even the leafs are being raked at every single street! But the great garden at the castle was...

...rather sad... No flowers in the pots, the trees were only trimmed half-hearted, holes in the ground... For an entrance ticket price starting at 11,50€, they could have kept the maintenance level quite a bit higher in my opinion. 

Also, it was hard to find where and how to use the ticket. You see, the tickets were different kind of tours; from 30-40 minutes in 22 rooms to a 2 day long tour. We bought the smallest one but didn't know what was included. Turns out, we both got a small "talker" that you could listen to. You wrote in the number of the room and held it up to your ear to hear about the different kinds of rooms and their residents! I really liked that since I'm usually too lazy or tired to read long walls of texts. Sadly, photographing was forbidden, but there was one room after the souvenir shop that I could take a picture of!

After resting our tired feet a bit, we started walking to the station again to head back to the city centre, but I noticed that the carriage museum was just in our way. I actually wanted to see that, so we went there.

The museum contains a collection of carriages used by the imperial family and Viennese court, including state coaches, ceremonial and gala carriages, sleighs and sedan chairs. It was great! There weren't many tourists there and youths under 19 didn't have to pay for it!

I saw many beautiful wagons, even child-sized ones that were pulled by specially trained sheep (!!) but these two were my favorites; a huge golden one, pulled by heavily decorated white horses. To give you a feeling of just how big it was; the back wheels were a little bit taller than I am! 

My other favorite was an all-black hearse that used to carry emperors and empresses to their final resting place. I think if the details had been in many different colors it would have looked kitschy, but if you have everything in one color you can have many more details and it will still look beautiful! 

This one was also enormous, about 3m tall and at least 7m long!

We continued our walk to the station when we came across another gem; a Lindt shop! Lindt is a brand known for their many types of chocolate. We have it in Sweden, but there are far from as many types and flavors as in this shop. There was white, milk and dark chocolate flavored with everything you can think of - fruits, nuts and even with flavors of alcoholic drinks. I bought a bar with blueberry & lavender flavored dark chocolate and a bag of assorted pieces that you could pick out yourself and the said salty caramel filled chocolate that is now half-finished.