Weekend in Vienna: castles, coffee & Ed Sheeran

Hello, dear Hivers! This post is coming a little late as my boyfriend & I visited Vienna over a month ago, but it took me some time to put this together… but here it goes!

The whole weekend was amazing: we saw each other after a really long time, were staying at our friend‘s house, and had a lot of fun (and coffee. A lot of coffee). We didn’t do a typical tourist Vienna but we did visit some nice spots so maybe you’ll get inspired by something 😊

Day 1

On the first day, we went to see the Schonbrunn castle. I’ve been to Vienna multiple times but I’ve never seen it (maybe because my visits were usually just transiting to/from the airport or the bus station) so it was about time I saw this thing. It’s huge! And that’s why, although there were quite many people, it didn’t really feel like it.

We didn’t go inside but we climbed the hill in the castle park to Glorietta, where we sat in the outside area of the café and had some coffee and Sacher cake (I mean, you can’t go to Vienna and not have Sacher).

Then we went to the city center for lunch. I had been craving something typically Central-European and goulash with beer was just what I needed. After that, obviously, we needed another coffee so we went to Caffé a Casa close to the university in the center.

But it was almost time to get to Ernst-Happel stadium because we were to see Ed Sheeran play live! We were very lucky as we got super close to the stage, although we came quite late. And the show was amazing, Ed is just so professional and builds his songs from scratch every time and it just adds to the whole experience. Hands down one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. Shame you can’t really capture the atmosphere in an article.

Day 2

On that day, we wanted to properly visit the city center, but we got stuck having breakfast and chat with our friend almost until 11, so in the end, we didn’t have that much time to do that. Instead, we decided to visit yet another castle we hadn’t been to before: the Belvedere castle. It was much smaller that Schonbrunn but still very pretty. Very close to the castle, we first discovered a cool lunch place called Gorilla Kitchen and a great café Carl Ludwig café with a pretty backyard to sit in. And then we continued to… another café. Yes, we are coffee freaks if you haven‘t noticed yet :D

This one was called Vollpension and I fell in love with its concept: the food and drinks here are sold in „Grandma care packages“ and you are served by grandmas and grandpas! They also prepare the cakes and coffees and the whole place really felt like you were visiting your lovely grandmother. It’s apparently a social project to connect seniors with the society and let them earn a little more than they have and I was just super excited and happy about a project like this. Highly recommended.

We finished the day at Donau (the Danube river) where we had dinner at one of the floating terraces. They had really good wine but the food wasn’t good. But we had a great time anyway.

If you’re planning a trip and would like to follow in our steps, I recommend watching a short reel on my Instagram where there is a full itinerary of places and establishments we visited, together with links to their Instagram accounts. Watch the reel HERE.