We will be living in an apartment in the Neubau district in the heart of Vienna (“Wien”) for the month of May. Our apartment is on the top floor (we would call it the 4th floor, but in Europe it's called the 3rd floor, that is, three floors above the ground floor). Street level is all commercial and everything we could need is just a few steps away, like this little shop with fresh produce, a complete small grocery store, a drugstore, a bakery, an ice cream parlor and and Irish pub called “Shebeen” that is located in the ground floor of our building.

Although the building is over 100 years old, the apartment is modern and spacious. It didn't take us any time at all to get comfortable. Here's Dale browsing some of the brochures that Mary and Erwin, our home exchange hosts left for us.

We love the building across the street (Lerchenfelder Straße) that we look at from the livingroom window…

… especially the peeping knight hanging from the top of the corner turret.

We're just a 5-minute walk from the Ringstrasse, the beautiful boulevard opened in 1865 by the last emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph (1848-1916), and built atop the former location of the old city walls. This year Vienna is celebrating the boulevard's 150th Anniversary. All the famous public and governmental buildings line the Ringstrasse: the Parliament Building, City Hall, the University of Vienna, the National Theater, the Opera House, the Museum Quarter and one of the Royal Palaces (the Hofburg), just to name a few. And if we need to hurry, Tram 46 has a station right outside our door and it connects directly to the trams that run along the Ringstrasse.

Our apartment is on the corner and the cross-street occasionally has a weekend market that looks like it's pretty popular.