Okay. Really long time no post. I have a lot to catch up on, so there will be much summarizing. I suppose I'll try and tackle Vienna now, as that will involve probably the most information, and it has been giving me a mental block on this blogging thing.
So when we last left our heroes, we had arrived in Vienna. We followed the directions we had gotten from the hostel and found our way through the Viennese metro, or the U-bahn (which has 6 lines compared to Budapest's paltry 3) to the hostel. The hostel we stayed at was called wombat's (that's supposed to be not capitalized), and was pretty great. We checked in, got ourselves into the rooms, which contained four beds, and headed off for a late dinner. Because our group had 11 people, there were two rooms of girls where they took every bed, but there was a guy we didn't know in the room with the three guys. He ended up being a French Canadian who partied quite hard (somewhere else, fortunately), who seemed like a good guy. He slept all day Saturday, so I assume he had had some fun the night before. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Some classmates of ours had recommended the hostel and a place to eat nearby, so we got directions from the hostel front desk and headed out to try and find it. We found it, but it was as much a bar as a restaurant, and was completely full of smoking Austrians with no seat in sight. We headed across the street to a different gasthaus, the Austrian term for restaurant (not sure if it's a specific type of restaurant or not). The kitchen turned out to be closing as we walked in, but they were still able to serve us food, though from a very limited selection: either blood sausage or pork chops. I got the blood sausage, which turned out to be fried, served with sauerkraut and potatoes and it appeared to floating in butter.

The sausage was good, not too rich, and it was all tasty, especially since I accompanied it with an Ottakringer beer, which was quite nice. Everyone had something similar and the meal, while tasty, was significantly more expensive than Budapest, which was rather unfortunate.
We then went back to our hostel and got our free drink at the hostel bar, the womBar. It was tiny and completely packed with various hostel-residents getting their free drink and enjoying the place. We spent the rest of the night drinking and relaxing in the hostel, as we were going to get up reasonably earlier the next day to go exploring Vienna.

Saturday we started off at around 9 (that's pretty early for me) and went to the Naschmarkt right across the street. I got breakfast, a stein and hot chocolate, in that order. It was a nice open air market, though very large and relatively expensive, so we didn't stay for too long, wanting to get into the center of Vienna. We took the metro downtown and saw St. Stephen's Cathedral, a large basilica that someone said has been under continual construction since about the 13th century. Not sure if that's true, but as we walked out of the cathedral, we saw a big scaffold running along its side, so maybe.

From there we walked down a rather scenic street to the Habsburg Palace Complex, which featured palaces and museums.

It was a nice pedestrian street, flanked with modern buildings with all kinds of modern businesses.
The palace itself was really cool looking.

That bottom picture is the entrance to the museum we went into, the National Library State Hall, which was basically a large, old library that had several small exhibits but was more of just a neat hall.

The coolest single thing in the hall, in my opinion, was an old first-page from a Bible:

That's the lion of Judea, with the outline (and everything else on the page) made from Hebrew letters. I thought it was really cool-looking, so I snuck a picture of it even though technically we weren't allowed to take pictures of the exhibits.
From the National Library we walked to lunch, which was tasty but not super exciting.

It was a beef soup with potatoes on the side. Those sauces are a sour-cream type deal and applesauce mixed with horseradish, which was really tasty. Unfortunately, they wouldn't give us tap water here, so we had to buy a bottle. I've been pretty lucky so far, and have managed to escape doing that at too many places.
After lunch, we headed off to another museum, the Esperanto Museum, which was focused on planned languages, the proper term for languages created by someone purposefully, and with a special focus on Esperanto, the most well-known of them. I'm not sure why exactly this museum was in Vienna, but it was really cool. It actually really made me want to learn Esperanto, since it can be mastered in about 6 months for an English speaker and has a random distribution of speakers around the world. Most importantly, there exists a passport program, where you can stay with another speaker of Esperanto somewhere in the world for free. They're mostly in Europe, but there's also a fair amount in South America and Asia, with less in Africa and the Middle East. So, if you like to travel for cheap and like learning languages...I would suggest Esperanto.
Then we just decided to walk around one of the ring roads in Vienna, which turned out to be a great idea. We walked through a park and saw many gorgeous buildings:












However, even better, we then stumbled across this:

Let's zoom in:

We managed to stumble across a large outdoor Viennese festival, where, outside of whatever this building is (it looks important), they have a giant pond for ice skating. And then a trail thing leading away from it. It was really cool, though we didn't end up skating because well, two of us (one of them me) can't skate, and we had no idea how the whole thing was organized. We had our stuff with us and couldn't see lockers to put them in, none of us spoke German, etc. So we just stood around, drank our respective alcoholic punches (I had caramel, it was delicious) and enjoyed watching people for a while.

After we left we just continued walking around the ring road until we found a cafe, where we took a short break, played some cards and drank some coffee. After that respite, we returned to the hostel and did homework, like the cool math majors we are, until dinner.
We went out to Franz, the place that had been recommended to us that we tried to go to the night before. To make sure we got in we went early. It was delicious and the cheapest meal we ate in Vienna, but still rather expensive by Budapest standards. I know I've said that several times, but...I've been spoiled by Budapest. Traveling almost anywhere else in Europe will be expensive...
So for dinner I had a cheese plate and then a pie stuffed with blood sausage with a side of sauerkraut and mustard and fresh grated horseradish.

It was really good, though looking back I feel kind of silly eating blood sausage both days. But it was tasty!
Anyways, after that we all retired to the hostel to recharge, taking naps and reading for a couple hours.
After this relaxing respite, we reconvened to head out to the Bermuda Triangle. The Bermuda Triangle is a neat cobblestoned part of Vienna with lots of different bars. After some wandering through various full or expensive bars, we found one that had space for us and wasn't too much money, so we sat down and ordered ourselves some of these:

That's a liter of winter beer. For reference, the mug is about the size of your head. We spent our time nursing these beers and enjoying the bar before calling it a night and returning to the hostel.

On Sunday, 9 was the hour we woke again. After a quick breakfast at the hostel, we headed off to some museums. Went to the Haus der Musik, which was a pretty cool museum about music, detailing the physical phenomenon and some Austrian or Austria-inspired composers. It was interesting, but no the coolest museum I've gone to.
After that, we went over to the museum quarter, grabbed a small lunch and hit up the Leopold Museum, which featured various contemporary art. It was not too large, so I made it through the whole thing. While contemporary European art isn't my bag, it was still interesting to see, since it was definitely different than most of the art museums I've been to.
I'm sorry I don't have more detail on the museums...that's one of the effects of having gone so long ago I suppose. To make up for it, here are some pictures of the Museum quarter, which is really cool.

That blockish building in the bottom pictures is another museum, modern art, that's supposed to be pretty cool, but we had no time.
After we left the museum, we returned to the hostel to pick up our stuff and then caught a late afternoon train in order to get back to Budapest by dinner.

And that's my Viennese saga. This probably would've been more interesting, with more details, if I had written it sooner after my return. I'll try and catch up now, since there's not nearly as large a block at once as this.