The tickets were a pain even before I left. Never, ever get paper tickets if you can avoid it. When I booked my trip back in October, at a phenomenal price of$255 round trip from YYZ-AMS-VIE-AMS-OTP-AMS-YYZ, I didn’t notice that I’d picked an Austrian Airlines flight that forced me to have a paper ticket. If I did, I might have reconsidered my flight choices.
In theory, this ticket was upgradeable with miles. In practice, paper tickets make simple things much harder. Like, three trips to the airport, a set of phone and e-mail conversations, and still having to again get the tickets reissued in Toronto right before the start of the trip complicated. But business class for an overnight flight does make everything better.
I’ll keep my thoughts on Vienna short. If you have an opportunity to spend a few days there, do it. It was a great, compact, historical city with architecture to die for and a certain charm and culture that easily matches Paris and London, only with lower prices. When the random street car conversations you overhear are discussions on the depth of various indie films playing at some theatre or other, you know what kind of place you’re in. And the Austrian countryside is pretty nice, as well, with some great biking opportunities.
Romania, on the other hand, was a whole other set of experiences that require some posting of their own.