Arriving in Austria

We arrived in Austria on the 19th of December by bus. And what a bus! We where dreading our five hour 15€ journey, that is, until we where welcomed onboard our bright yellow Student Agency coach.

We had seats right up at the front, big comfy seats. There where touch screens for every person with films, games, documentaries and music. Headphones where available too. Bright yellow ones of course!

And the best part: free wifi and free tea, coffee and hot chocolate!
Needless to say, five hours flew by! I’ve never travelled so well!
Not to mention the amusement of being able to watch our crazy Austrian driver dance his way across the boarder to his personal electronic music which clashed with the quiet radio for the rest of the coach. Ha! He had a good collection of chocolate which was fed to him by the pretty bus hostess (would you call her that?! I have never come across one before). It cant be a bad job really, especially with fancy buses nowadays which aren’t half as hard to drive as they used to be.

Anyhow, moving on from our exciting journey to our arrival in Vienna. We where dropped off in the centre of town so we needed to get the underground to the train station.
This is probably a good time to tell you where we where going. After some stressful weeks of not finding a second Workaway we found René and Elke in Austria who have a small farm close to Vienna but I’ll tell you all about that later. Essentially after some e-mails we agreed on dates and times and here we are!
So, René had kindly given us great directions on how to get to Westbahnhof (the train station) so it was pretty straight forward. We where pretty proud of ourselves actually, we got to the station 15mins earlier than our agreed time. Bought our tickets which where crazy expensive compared to the Czech Republic. Almost as much as our bus there!

I have realised we have a real issue with first impressions. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing this on here because I send the blog link with our applications on Workaway. So to you future hosts: we are working on it ok? I really want to sort this!

Right, on with the story: We had agreed to meet on the platform 15min before the train left. As the time got closer and closer there was still no sign of René. David said we should get on the train, that he probably had too. By that point most people where on already and we where worried we would miss it. We thought our tickets where only for that train (we later found out they are all like open tickets :/). The platform and train are massive by the way. So we got on to discover that there was free wifi, so I began writing him an email only to receive one saying he was still waiting for us and had we got lost. The train was already moving though.
He would get the next train and meet us in St Pölten. Once we got off the train we no longer had wifi so we ran around guessing which platform he would be on and he ended up finding us. What a massive relief! By that point I had a huge ball of worry and guilt in my stomach.

To finish off an eventful day, the car wouldn’t start so we had to push it down a hill to try to bump start it which didn’t work. As we where preparing for a second try it miraculously started. Apparently it has never done that and is yet to do it again. Strange.

We have settled in now and soon all will be forgiven and forgotten. Fat chance. It will probably haunt us until the last day like the lost text messages to Tom!