00:03 John Daub: You're now watching a live stream in Vienna and that is St. Stephen's Cathedral up there. One of the most beautiful in Europe, I think. It's amazing. I love the roof on it, the design there. And below it is Vienna's most touristy Christmas market. But it's a lot of fun. You can see at this time of year, it's a little bit more festive. How you doing?

00:34 John Daub: It is minus seven right now. We're freezing. We had some Glühwein. We came here just to celebrate a little bit of Christmas here. We have a meet-up over here. This is my partner in crime today. He's got the Wi-Fi.

00:49 Sandro: Hi, I'm Sandro.

00:50 John Daub: Nice to meet you, Sandro. Come on, let's go meet everybody over here. Kanae's already talking to everybody. Is this the best market in Vienna or what?

00:58 Kanae Daub: It's pretty good. It's okay.

01:04 John Daub: Okay. Here's everybody. Hi. How you doing? We have a very warm welcome here in Vienna. Yeah. It's really cold.

01:15 Kanae Daub: It's really cold.

01:20 John Daub: But this is our last night on our European Christmas market swing through. We started in Vienna. We flew in here. We went up to Prague and then Nuremberg, Munich for about an hour, then Garmisch, Innsbruck, and we came today to Vienna to end it all. We had cake and coffee at Demel, which cost us an arm and a leg. It really did. It was expensive, but so worth it. And now we're having our last Glühwein in this really cute mug. Check this out here. You can take a look. Oh, yours is empty.

01:50 Kanae Daub: Yes.

01:51 John Daub: Sandro, we're going to have to fill that up here.

01:53 Sandro: I think I have to drink more.

01:55 John Daub: Oh, wow. Yeah. Look at that. And that's a picture of the city. And there's the St. Stephen's Cathedral on the boot. This is the most expensive Glühwein I've had in the entire trip.

02:05 Sandro: Yeah.

02:06 John Daub: It's €4 for one and €4 for the deposit. But I'll tell you something. You get 0.5 liters more.

02:14 Sandro: Right? 0.05 liters more. So that makes, right? Something like that. So it kind of pays off in itself.

02:26 John Daub: So, Kampai to everybody out there. Prost. Thanks for coming to the meetup. Prost, everybody. And Prost to you out there. It's a lot warmer than right here. My friend Dominique is not here, which means that there's no shot of extra rum or chili schnapps. We miss you, Dominique. Thanks for coming yesterday. And the day before really had a lot of fun. Kanae, what is your favorite on this trip? What was your favorite Christmas market, you think? Which one do you like?

03:11 Kanae Daub: It's a very difficult. Because everywhere is beautiful.

03:15 John Daub: We're in Vienna. You should say Vienna.

03:19 Kanae Daub: Vienna. Wien.

03:24 John Daub: Vienna is the best Christmas market because we're in Vienna. Kanae, you gotta remember where we are. But I want to give you a chance if you want to introduce yourself. Anybody want to say hi to everybody? We have a hundred people coming now. Anyone want to say hi? Everybody wants to say hi?

04:15 Guest: Hi!

04:16 John Daub: Wait, I wasn't born yet! I was like, oh my gosh, really? I came here in 96 when I was still a college student and my friend Joe's sister was living about 50 meters on the other side of the square and I remember the first few days I would come out here and I couldn't believe where I was. Right outside of her apartment was this amazing cathedral. This is called St. Stephen's Cathedral. It's massive. It's so beautiful inside of it. And the one thing that just strikes me about it is that it's really in the heart of the city. This is like the Ginza area and right in the middle of it is one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Europe. It's incredible to have that. So that's why I think I always say I could probably live in Vienna. The one city in Europe, I could probably live in Vienna. I don't know why.

05:03 Sandro: There's an interesting tech or program that every street in Vienna is... If you're counting down the street numbers and going to the lowest number and then go to the next street and the lowest number, you always will get to the Stephansplatz in the center of the city. So you'll never get lost that way. And it's so tall. You can see the steeple from everywhere.

05:28 John Daub: You see that? It was under renovation for a long time, wasn't it?

05:29 Sandro: It's still under renovation. It's always under renovation. But inside of it, you can go in there. It's free to go in there. And this is still a working cathedral, so there's always people praying in there. You have to be respectful of that. But it's so lovely. You can't pass up a chance to come here. Although this is also the most touristy area of the city.

05:52 John Daub: Thanks for coming to the most touristy area. But the Rathaus has a really vibrant Christmas market. Karlsplatz Market. We walked through there. Coming here was very nice. But what Christmas market would you recommend in Vienna?

06:05 Sandro: Definitely at the Rathaus at the Major Hall. I would say Rathaus maybe for the spectacle. And Spittelberg if you want something nicer. Less touristy quality.

06:23 John Daub: Like what? Food? Actually, in the Rathaus, we had this hot dog in a baguette. They just hollowed it out. And the bread was really bad. We couldn't finish the bread. It was kind of hard and stale. But it was good. The mustard was good.

06:56 Sandro: I like the mustard.

06:58 John Daub: So right now we're using Sandro's bandwidth, Wi-Fi. So much appreciated. Hope the signal coming in is doing well. If you guys have some questions about Vienna's Christmas market, we are here to answer them. Because everyone here lives in Vienna.

07:13 Sandro: Except for us.

07:17 John Daub: Don't ask me. Steve writes in, huge fan. John, first live chat. Say hi to Kanae.

07:22 Kanae Daub: Hey, Steve. Hi. How you doing, Steve? Kanae says hi. Hi, I'm here.

07:30 John Daub: So we're going to walk around one time around the cathedral so you can take a look at this, the most touristy of the markets. If you're here, it's worth coming to this Christmas market. And then what's that? That's the bell. Oh, it's the bell. That's loud. I love Europe. We don't have this in Japan. This is not only in Japan anymore. Yeah, we're at Stephansdom, St. Stephen's Cathedral. Sponsored by Coca-Cola. I like that. I'm messing with you. It's so loud. Is this on the hour? Is that why? So we're on the hour now. That's awesome. I don't want to leave. I don't want to go back to Japan. Is that okay with you guys? Can I stay here only in Vienna?

09:06 Sandro: We're going to make a new channel. I think we can stay in here. You can go to the apartment and we move to Japan. Apartment swap. And we can make a channel maybe only in Austria.

09:24 John Daub: I was surprised how big Austria is. It took us about four hours on the train to get from Innsbruck. It's quite big. And Innsbruck isn't even the end of it, right? It keeps going all the way for another hour or so. I would say Austria looks small on the map, but it's pretty big. The trains are slow. That's why. It's like Brit Rail, right? Maybe better. Maybe better than what the Brits have over there in the UK. Sorry. We have people now that are going to get on the train. They're going to really get upset about that. Or they understand. He goes, yeah, our rail is a little old. Ah, that's for Dominique. He would approve of how fast I drank that. So we'll come back for the deposit, but we want to take you around here. You guys want to take a quick walk around?

10:17 Sandro: Yes. Definitely, if you have some history you want to introduce to the people, we could use some of that.

10:29 John Daub: I always get it wrong. Sometimes I make stuff up and people catch me. If I make up the facts here. Hey, there's Edo from Holland. We're not that far away, sort of. Closer than Tokyo. So I'm supposed to blur people's faces, right? Because we're in Europe. All right. Nobody, I'm telling people, please don't look directly into the camera. We'll do our best to respect the laws. It is always surreal to me that when I come to Vienna, I love when you come out of the escalator of the stations. And you come up the escalator and on the right side of it, you see the cathedral popping up out of it. It's amazing. So you come up from the station up there. The funny thing is you were here before, I think, one and a half hours. And I saw you post on your story. Wait, it doesn't see him. Yeah, I guess I came here, I posted the story, and then we moved on to go to Demel to eat pastry. I love how they add color to it. Is it like this all year round or?

11:40 Sandro: Not all year round, but on the special occasions like Christmas or Easter.

11:47 John Daub: It seems like the lens isn't super wide anymore. YouTube has changed that. I updated it and we lost our super wide, but maybe it's super wide. I'm not sure. This is, that looks good. It looks like a pizza. Oh, it's potato. Interesting. How long do the markets stay open in Vienna?

12:11 Sandro: Depends. Most ones until 22. Until 10 PM.

12:19 John Daub: Oh, that's nice. Mostly in Germany, they close by 7. Innsbruck closes at 7:30, most of them. And then the alcohol ones will close at 9. Innsbruck's maybe more traditional, perhaps. But I thought that was sad because our drinking ended. All of them just stopped serving, which is probably a good thing for who might've drank all the Glühwein. This is the back of St. Stephen's Cathedral. This is probably, I don't know. I liked the one in Cologne, Germany, but since there's a lot of wonderful cathedrals, but this one to me is always going to be my favorite. I'm not just saying that because I'm in Vienna. It's just, I have a lot of really good memories in the city, walking around the cathedral. There's always some renovations going on, but it looks like most of it is done. It's not as, it doesn't block the cathedral, the beauty of it as much as it did a couple of years ago, which is great for us because you can see it a little bit better.

13:34 Sandro: This is the coldest day of the year, I think. This must be the coldest.

13:37 John Daub: No, definitely not. No? You gotta be kidding. Yeah, there will be coming more colder days. Oh yeah, they're coming, but it couldn't have been this cold. This is like minus double digits, it feels like. I can't feel.

13:54 Sandro: Last year, I made a photo shoot with a friend and it has around minus 14.

14:07 John Daub: When you said minus 40, I got freaked out, like really. Wow. So I noticed a lot of the statues here are of death. Death and evil things, I don't know. Is there some connection?

14:23 Sandro: Yeah, it's no fun, funny stories. No, no, no. So the history of Vienna goes back like centuries, like a thousand years or more, right? Very much like Japan, but the Middle Ages might have been tough here. So you see a lot of the art with... Nice way to... Good thing. So that makes you appreciate life a lot more, I think.

14:55 John Daub: So right now, for those joining us, we're at the Christmas market in Vienna, going around St. Stephen's Cathedral, which is just absolutely stunning. And they've lit it up just for the Christmas season. There's some lights around it, which add even more characteristics to this cathedral, which is beautiful. This is the backside of it. We're going to go over towards the front. This is one of my favorite cities in Europe, because for me, it's always been a hub where I can travel. I fly into Vienna and I can travel either through Germany or go to the East, because I love the East. I used to travel to Romania and Hungary and Poland and this side a lot when I was younger, because it was cheaper.

15:51 Sandro: I live now since four years here in Vienna and I also started traveling with cheap options like Flixbus or something. And yeah, I'm going to Germany, to Hungary. And this time I was the first time in London, in Britain. And yeah, it was really nice to see other things outside of Austria.

16:17 John Daub: This Flixbus is all over Europe. That's very convenient, isn't it? Have you ever taken the Flixbus?

16:23 Kanae Daub: No?

16:24 John Daub: Is it because it's a bus or...? The thing is, most of the ways when you travel to Germany, you sit in for 10 hours or more. Not everybody loves it. But the Flixbus is cheap. But if you book in advance, a flight is always going to be better, right? But it's changed a little bit. Because the night trains, there aren't that many like there used to be 20 years ago, which is sad. I always had a Eurail pass and it would take night trains to save money on the hotels. But there was a culture to the couchettes where you put the beds up and you can relax and wake up and you're in the next city. But that's changed because everyone's taking cheap flights. The Eurail pass has a different sort of... It's not as much fun as it used to be because the night trains are gone. The Paris to Rome is gone. The Paris to Venice is like a private company. But Vienna has a pretty good array of night trains going in all directions, especially to the east and down to Venice. I like that one. Venice to Vienna is one of my favorites.

17:40 Sandro: Night trains. Have you been on the night train?

17:43 John Daub: When I was backpacking, you weren't even born yet. That's why I said, like, have you been on the night trains? I drove to Milano. Italy one time. And it was really cool. And I definitely want to try because the Austrian wants to make new night trains, modern night trains. And I definitely want to try them out too. I think that... Seeing Europe by train is the best way. And it's really cool because outside the window everything is just rolling past. Especially in Innsbruck, the mountains, the Alps, were so beautiful. This country is so beautiful, especially on that side because of the... We had clouds covering the first day we arrived and then the next day. But this morning, the clouds were gone. We had blue skies and my jaw was on the ground. Like I cannot believe how tall the Alps are. We have some tall mountains in Japan, Mount Fuji. But just all of the mountains, they're huge. All around the city, like, it's beautiful with these massive mountains around Innsbruck. We could not believe how you see the city and then you see the mountains all over the landscape. The blue sky, it was extraordinary. We didn't want to leave, but we wanted to come to Vienna. We had to leave. They kicked us out. Well, we kicked ourselves out.

19:07 John Daub: Hey, Kanae, did you like Innsbruck the best?

19:10 Kanae Daub: Yes?

19:13 John Daub: You have to put her on the spot. Hey, Alice. I see Alice is here. Well, what? All right, because we're in Vienna, Kanae learns very quickly. The city that you're in is always the best. She learned that one. What's your favorite city?

19:31 Kanae Daub: Vienna.

19:32 John Daub: You see? She's very, very, very smart. That's the right answer. Yeah, no, because no one's putting it into a headlock, so that's the right answer. Nobody would do that anyway. So where is... I want to talk a little bit about Japan because we're going back there tomorrow. Has everybody here been to Japan before?

19:58 Sandro: Sadly, no. Except for one person, right? Three people.

20:05 John Daub: But you're going in July and then you'll be left for... You've got to come 2025 to Osaka. To the Expo. What attracts you to Japan? What's interesting to you about Japan?

20:18 Guest: Many things because I started in 2015 to start going to anime conventions. And I'm a cosplay photographer since 2017. One year later, I thought, hey, all of these wonderful cosplays, I tried them myself too. So I'm now a cosplayer too. Japanese culture, the people and everything. It's so nice there.

20:52 John Daub: We'll have to talk about what we could do more for this channel on cosplay because I haven't covered enough on that topic. Should we do something about cosplay? When I come to Japan? Before 2025. That's like five years away. Kevin, I'm like, yeah, the Olympics is coming to Tokyo 2020 and then 2025 is the Osaka World Expo. And that's Kevin Reilly's territory. And we're like, yeah, Kevin's going to be happy about that. But that's five years, more than five years away. Hopefully, you can come to Japan before that. But I definitely try to come before. Yeah, please do. Bring the cathedral with you. Break St. Stephen's Cathedral. Can you put that in your suitcase, please? It's beautiful. It's had so much time. We need some of that. It might go over the luggage limit, I think, if you did try to bring that in there. It's cold. We're going to walk around. Let's go to the other side. Did everybody finish their Glühwein?

21:55 Kanae Daub: Yeah.

21:56 John Daub: What is Glühwein? That's that warm stuff that keeps you warm in your stomach. Makes you smile. We're going to go to the front of the cathedral now. And yeah, just a little bit of taste of Vienna because I think if you're doing a European trip, this has to be on your itinerary for sure. This is like... If there's Kyoto, Osaka, Tokyo. If there's a European trip, Vienna has to be on it.

22:26 Sandro: I live here since four years and it gave me so much opportunities here. Since the job, friends. So I really love to live here.

22:37 John Daub: It's one of the livable cities in around the world. So it is. It's a big, it's not a massive city, but it is one of the world's big cities. And you can see the history. You can't avoid the history. Even from the airport, like the history is in your face. But it's very convenient to get... It's so well connected. It's only 15 minutes to get from the airport into the center of the city. And it's pretty... It's reasonably cheap compared to Narita, which is like an hour. All right, everybody get in front of the fire. Stay warm. Oh, that's nice. I could feel that. Oh, you have no idea how welcome this is. Not that much, but it still takes it above zero. Oh, everybody around the fire. This is nice. Much appreciate much love to Alice out there. Right. Okay. Let's look at the front and then we're going to end the live stream. This is like this. These meetups are almost last minute type of things like, oh, that's the chocolate you gave us, right? Thank you. This is we're going to take you to the front of St. Stephen's Cathedral and then end the live stream. But it's really nice to go anywhere that we go in the world. It's really nice that we can get people to come out and welcome us and introduce some of the local culture. And that makes what I do teaching people about Japan even more special. Look at that. There's an ambulance blinking lights, security forces. So that's nice. You feel safe here. Here's the front of St. Stephen's Cathedral. It's massive. This truly is massive. And it's one of the great cathedrals in Europe. I just love the fact that you see around it all the shops and the subway station is right there. It's about 20 meters. And that's the escalator that you come up and you come up the escalator and you see this. It's just such a sight to come out.

25:01 John Daub: Why don't we do that? Where's everybody? Let's go down and come up and just show them from the escalator. It's so stupid. But it has to be done. So John has a nice idea. I have a stupid idea. We're going to go down the escalator. Just come up and show everybody. It'll take just like five seconds. If you want to, you can wait here or you can come with us. You have to come because you have the choice to come. We look at 30 seconds. This is ridiculous, but it's not. I'm going to share with you. It's OK. In London I was at the financial district and it was also there. You come up from the metro and then, wow, I know it's high buildings. Oh, it's amazing. All right. We're going to go down and I'm going to show you what I was talking about. This is why the first time I came to Vienna, I remember coming up this escalator in 1996 and I was blown away. Imagine like I'd never seen a cathedral before. And then we're just going to do a U-turn right here and go right up the escalator. This is so geeky to do, but yet it's not. All right. Just you'll see what I was talking about. All right. So we've just come out of the subway. You're going up here, the escalator. All right. You don't see anything yet, but you turn a little bit to the right now. Watch. This is what I'm talking about. Is that it's like ridiculous, right? Look at this. What? That's what I'm talking about. That's crazy. I've never seen anything that big and that old just pop right out of the view of the subway. The escalator like that seems dumb is awesome. And this is like would be the Ginza lot of style shops here. The lights over there are beautiful. City is so, so beautiful. So, so Christmasy right now is even a little bit snow on Graben Street. Graben is the main street. It's beautiful.

27:28 John Daub: I can't live stream in the cathedral. No, I'm not going to live stream in cathedral. We can't do that. That's that'd be bad, right? You can't like respect. I'm going to leave that for you if you want to see inside of St. Stephen's. It's beautiful inside there. I think that's something that you, if you are religious, that's something you should keep for yourself. But walking inside of a cathedral, oh man, the acoustics in there, especially when they're playing organ music, is out of, it's amazing inside of there. And we went when there was a, there was, what do you call it? There was a religious, something was going on inside there. And they had organ music going. And I was really moved. I just closed my eyes, and you could just listen to the sound of the organ reverberating just off of the walls and the high ceilings. It's amazing that man has created this cathedral. We don't got that in Japan, okay? We don't have that in Japan. It's only in Austria. That's right. These cathedrals, these places are only in Austria, only in Austria. Yeah, this part of Europe is stock. Central Europe is really awesome. And the food, how do you stay so thin. I don't know. I put on, I put on a third chin, thanks to this, the wonderful food here in Europe. So thanks guys for watching. Just a little bit of taste of Vienna, sharing some Glühwein with you all over the world. There's a, this way, there was some good, good markets over here I saw. And then on the other side of St. Stephen's Dom, St. Stephen's Cathedral, there's a market right on the side of it. And there's Graben Street that takes you down. It's really beautiful. There's a lot of people over there. I'm not going to show you that. Should I show them that. Should I show them Graben Street? Yes, I think. All right, we're going to walk over towards the Graben Street and then... Okay, we'll show you that because it's really beautiful. I got to show you that. There's a Christmas tree in the center of it. For me, again, like the first, one of the first cities that I fell in love with in Europe was here in Vienna. And I remember walking down the street. There weren't as many tourists back then.

29:41 Sandro: The funding is three hours before you came here. And there was, I think it was for... irrational. Or something. They put snow, yeah. There's the rest of the snow. So it is a white Christmas, this is very little, just very little. They put the snow for filming something I don't know what. Snow, but it's from a machine, right, or did they bring it from Salzburg up in a mountain? I think they bring it from the mountain, so yeah.

30:15 John Daub: Yeah we can officially say we have snow we have snow not that much. All right let's just i want to show you down these down the street this is would be the consider the Ginza of Austria i think that's pretty pretty amazing the lights that they have here the paint color they go up across the very old buildings like this in a pattern and on this side of i believe this is Graben avenue you can see the u yeah the u for the underground this is St Stephansdom uh the middle of the center of the city of Vienna and you can see it looks like chandeliers hanging the light is so beautiful and it's so cold right now our ears are frozen but Kanai and I were taking pictures on the other side the Julius Meinl supermarket is on the other side a really stylish uh place but you could see it's very very active um and as the night goes on more so then we got to go back because tomorrow morning we have an early flight out here beautiful i love vienna i'm gonna pan over now and you're gonna see the cathedral and we're we're just far enough away where you can see i love the roof of it don't you look at that oh man this is why we came out here we can feel christmas we could feel the christmas spirit and there's a spire up there and you you can't miss it when you walk around the sea from the room in vienna and uh innsbruck we can see the moon out there but it's it's really pretty we've got clear skies today which is great and got st stephen's dom cathedral uh view right there the christmas tree right down there there's a christmas market you can see the lid up in the distance and that's vienna for you a lovely lovely place thanks for showing us your city no problem really appreciated it we're looking forward uh your trip to japan soon in the 2025 yes of course it's way too long i want to show you some one of them oh yeah oh very cool it's a pokemon trainer from uh pokemon summer boom and i will have to do it so i make this my by myself and how's the cosplay community here in austria is it quite big um we have we have uh some uh we have three big conventions and more small conventions there in here in vienna in graz in salzburg also one in the near of innsbruck at seefeld and yeah we have also many cosplays yeah i'm basically more organizing some poke groups because okay cool see what do you think of the pokemon movie be honest you mean the detective pikachu it's it was so nice i'm looking left and right sorry because i'm looking for kanai can i lost kanai that's the best way to end the live stream lose your wife lose your wife but kanai if you're watching this i'll meet you in front of the cathedral in five minutes there you go it's always a lot of fun guys thanks so much for joining us on this adventure in vienna a little christmas market this is our last christmas market in europe and it was a very warm meet up with some new friends and we'll be back in vienna for sure because as i said this is like our this is our our this is our hub this is when we come into europe we come into vienna or munich somewhere in the middle here because central europe is stacked with things to see and do and when christmas cannot be any better than austria germany and in this trip the czech republic so see you guys have a good day and a good night wherever you're in the world much love bye and if you like some cosplay um i have a instagram page shikazu photo so if you like you can look at the photos where i made or a photos made enough me in first place and very cool we'll put the link in the description so yeah yes how could i miss this lovely city thanks for thanks for coming and joining us tonight bye everybody the last 20 seconds i'm going to dedicate to this amazing amazing church here cathedral look at it it's warm inside should be going there yeah