We started our third, and last, day in Vienna at Demel--a famous chocolate company that opened in 1786, and served Empress Sisi herself during her time in the city. We'd stopped by Demel a few days earlier to buy small bars of dark chocolate (which were amazingly smooth), but never would have imagined we'd be back...for breakfast.

Our last day was a Sunday, which meant the entire city was closed. Shop windows were dark, passersby were heading to late-morning services, and not a drop of coffee was to be found anywhere. The one espresso-brewing, milk-frothing location we could find was the royal chocolatier itself.

So we sat upstairs in what seemed like an old living room or lounge, with its almost Parisian décor and poufs and curved footed tables and gilded mirrors. I finally tried an apfelstrudel (you guessed it: apple strudel), and Ryan got a slice of chocolate cake so sweet that the waiter politely warned him twice just how sweet it was. (Needless to say, he didn't touch anything else with sugar for the rest of the day.)

In a nutshell, today was Day 1 of 2 of Jessica suffering Ryan's love and appreciation for modern art. Day 2 was much worse. At least today offered some Gustav Klimt and the discovery of a new favorite artist.

We started off at the Albertina Museum, just across from the opera house and the Monument Against War and Fascism. The Albertina houses "modern" (read: avant-garde) art stemming back to the 1700s, from Picasso to Egon Schiele. In fact, there was a huge Egon Schiele exhibit while we were there, which was fascinating to go through. (We'd gone through some of his works together while in a bookstore in Portland years and years ago, and a print of one of his many self-portraits hangs over Ryan's desk, but otherwise we knew very little about him. Dude was messed up, but his art was cool.) My favorite part of the museum was discovering an artist I really love, who Ryan also enjoyed enough to dub him "a new favorite": Franz Sedlacek, a thoroughly depressed Polish artist whose work is a perfect mix of creepy and amazing.

Over the course of our trip, we've gotten into a sort of rhythm for how we explore and get to know a new place. By this point, we were on our seventh stop, and making our way to a tourist information desk in each new place would have been both exhausting and pointless. (We were aiming for the least "touristy" experience in each place, besides crossing the major sights off our list.)

So we've figured out that the fastest, most informative, and most enjoyable way to start our time in a new city has been to download Rick Steves's relevant audio walking tour (or, where impossible, open his iBook on our iPads) and follow along. Either format comes with a PDF of recommended walks around certain "themes"--the old city, a particular quarter or market area, a nature walk, an historic overview of a city's past. Besides just getting a lay of the land, we'd be able to bookmark sights and attractions we're interested in tackling later, and often Rick will throw in a few side notes about language, culinary, culture, or navigation tips that we couldn't have easily gotten elsewhere.

So we started our day in Vienna at the Wiener Staatsoper, the state opera house, which is absolutely beautiful both inside and out. It was a convenient first stop on our tour anyway, because we had to pick up tickets for the following night's opera (thanks to Carole). Across the street from the Staatsoper was none other than the original Hotel Sacher with its own Sacher Café, the same local chain we'd visited for tortes on the river in Salzburg the previous day. But in Vienna, the tortes were in such high demand--particularly among tourists--that the line wound out the door and snaked its way down the sidewalk.