It took less than 30mins to reach Washington D.C from the family house in Northern Virginia. Jaime drove us to The Kennedy Center to watch Phantom of the Opera.

The Kennedy Center is located on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.

The exquisite opera costumes on display.

We were seated in the third row in front of the stage. The last opera, Tosca, that we watched was in Vienna, Austria and that was back in 2003! For Tosca, we stood and watched throughout the Italian opera in the standing gallery. The standing gallery ticket only cost around S$7 (but we queued for the tickets for about two hours, first come first serve basis), whereas a ticket for Phantom of the Opera at our seat cost USD98. It was Frank’s opera treat. Nonetheless, it was a very nice opera with awesome stage scenes and costumes too.

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We took a direct train to Vienna, the capital of Austria and reached Vienna after a few hours of train ride from Prague. We checked in to Hotel Praterstern - the BEST hotel that we had stayed throughout the trip in Europe!! Anyway, it had to be the best, as it is literally the only HOTEL we had stayed; we stayed in youth hostels previously.

The historic centre of Vienna is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. St Stephen’s Cathedral is just a walking distance away from our hotel. It is a Romanesque and Gothic styles cathedral and is the most important religious building in Vienna.

The other side of St Stephen’s Cathedral.

Vienna is so different from the other states that we had visited in Austria earlier on. It is like Paris; it has plenty of boutiques and shoppers. There are also more Asians. Many buskers could sing classical soprano very well too! The people could speak good English and more helpful and friendlier too.

The shopping lane in the city centre seemed to me like the one in Nanjing Street, Shanghai. And the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We had an enjoyable time savouring delicious Austrian pastries, ice-creams and sausages. Of course, they were no longer as cheap as those in Prague. Everything was back to double. Ouch! :(

And plenty of Mozart Chocolate Balls…

Exploring the city by foot… Read the full story

At the Opera House (Wiener Staatsoper) ticket counter, we checked out the schedule for the opera of the day. Everyone has been saying we must visit the Opera House for an opera in Vienna, it’s world famous for operas. The ticket officer was very helpful. He recommended us some of the performances and from him, we knew that students can watch certain performances for free! How fortunate! No wonder they are cultivated since young to appreciate classical music and arts.

We couldn’t watch for free since we were no longer young school kids. The ticket officer highly recommended an opera called “TOSCA” to us. It was a Category A (Best) Opera and all tickets were already sold out. But we could queue up for the standing gallery tickets, on a first-come-first-served basis. The ticket officer suggested that we could queue up one and a half hour earlier before the opera started.

The queue had already started by the time we joined in. A Japanese man in his fifties was queuing behind us. We lined up for about one and a half hour and luckily, there were still tickets left and we finally bought our tickets. The ticket was cheap - €3.50 only for a world class performance in a world class opera house! But it came with no seat.

There are a few entrance doors to the standing gallery. We had to think and act fast as people who got the tickets were rushing into the standing gallery. The Japanese man who was behind us was already running ahead of us at the entrance to grab the best view of the stage! We were not bad either, we had a good standing view.

The interior of the Opera House is so elegant like a palace.

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