Vienna

The last stop in our holiday was two nights in Vienna.  We went by train from Salzburg to Vienna, and then caught a taxi to our hotel.  I highly recommend the Starlight Suites in Vienna, they are recently refurbished suites and our room(s) was lovely.  After dropping off our bags, we went for a walk along the main shopping street and soon found the Sacher Hotel, which was one of the things on our list of places to see.  The Sacher Hotel is a fancy hotel, but is probably more famous for the "Original Sacher Torte" which is basically a fancy chocolate cake with apricot jam in it.  So of course we ordered this and I tried a Sacher Liquour, which seems to be a alcoholic chocolate syrup:
 
Yum!

We then continued walking around and found the St. Stephen's Cathedral:

The blue/grey area on the tower is actually scaffolding hidden by giant posters of what the tower looks like underneath, an ingenious way of hiding ugly scaffolding and still looking almost like it should.
That night we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant we found. It was hilarious as there was about five waiters and they all came and said hello to Charlotte and one took her on a tour of the restaurant, and then gave her a bread stick made from pizza dough:

When were eating our dinner they kept on coming over to say hello and ignoring the other customers!

The next morning we went for a walk to find the Spanish Riding School to watch morning practise (the shows are only on weekends and we were leaving on a Thursday).  They practise in a big hall which is essentially inside the palace (illegal photo):


After watching them go through their paces with lovely classical music playing for about an hour, we continued on our way and found Cafe Central.  Of course I made a joke about them copying Queanbeyan, but this one is a little bit older and fancier.  So we sat down for some yummy morning tea:


Then we found a butterfly house in the grounds of the Hofburg Palace. They were a little bit disappointing compared to ones we had seen in Australia before, I think we only saw about four butterflies!
We grabbed some lunch and went to find the Treasury which holds all the Austrian crown jewels. Of course they say that theirs are better than the British ones so they get more tourists, but they were pretty good:


On the way back to the hotel, Jo found a really nice shop. She had seen some people walking around with really fancy shopping bags, but didn't know where they were from. So when she saw a shop with the same sign we went to have a look, and it turned out to be a really nice baby clothes shop! Of course we had to buy some nice things so that Jo could get the nice shopping bag!
Just before we got back to our hotel we found a nice park across the road where sat in the sun for a while, and saw some strange sign that we can only assume means "Make sure you feed the evil looking rats so they get so fat and can't move":


That night we went to a Mozart dinner and concert and met an older Brazilian couple who loved Charlotte. I think the man must have held Charlotte for almost an hour all up, the strangest thing was when an asian lady came up and grabbed Charlotte off the Brazilian couple for a cuddle! We figured that was going too far!
Charlotte really enjoyed the concert and was trying to conduct the orchestra. When the opera singers were announced she decided to audition. Luckily everybody thought it was hilarious and gave her a round of applause. Since it was late, Jo decided to take Charlie home in the intermission. Overall it was a nice night, even if it is just for tourists:


The next day was our last day and we had to check out by 2pm, so we went out to Schonbrunn Palace for a quick visit. The Palace is about 20mins by train out of the city and is fairly large. We had a look around the State apartments, trying to manuver Charlotte's stroller around the hundreds of Italian school kids. It was a lovely, warm sunny day and every spare seat or patch of grass was full of the locals stretching out and exposing as much of themselves to the sun as possible. Very funny!
In the back of the Schonbrunn Palace grounds is the oldest zoo in the world. So we went and had a look. It was an awesome zoo probably better than Sydney's Taronga Zoo. There were all sorts of animals, but Jo really wanted to see the Giant Panda's. We had a bit of a worry when we couldn't see them, but it turns out they were inside chomping on bamboo:

One of the strangest things we saw was an enclosure that had some sort of monkeys in with some sort of goat, and one of the monkeys seemed to be milking a goat!!!


After the Palace we headed back to the hotel to checkout and then walked around the shops for a few more hours before heading out to the airport. After a little bit of fuss and lots of double checking all the tickets (so we didn't have the same problem as the way over) we hopped on the plane to start the journey home. Due to the way the trip was booked we had to fly through Helsinki, Bangkok, Sydney and home. So we got onto a FinnAir flight and were served a nice reindeer lunch!
We had thought we were leaving all the cold weather behind us when we got on the plane, so we packed most of our cold gear into the suitcases. Oops!
Turns out that in Helsinki our flight was one that you have to get off outside and catch a bus back to the terminal, except that outside was -4 degrees and snowing!!


Luckily we found enough jumpers and a small blanket to keep Charlotte warm, but we must have looked like idiots. We then had 20mins to walk from one side of the airport to the other to catch the flight to Bangkok and on home.
Here is Charlotte listening to some tunes on the way home:


Some more pictures of around Vienna are here:

Vienna

Berchtesgaden and Salzburg

On Saturday after our morning in Innsbruck we drove to Berchtesgaden, where I had booked us into a FeWo (which is short for some long thing, that basically means self-catered apartment).  This was part of a farmhouse in the alps south of Salzburg.  Thank God for the GPS, because we would still be looking for it now otherwise!  We were a little apprehensive when we followed the directions and were driving higher and higher, and on smaller and smaller roads surrounded by deep snow!!  When we had called to arrange stay early, we had realised that the owners spoke only very limited English, and only Bettina (the mother) really spoke any English at all!  Unfortunately she was not there when we arrived, so we had an interesting time trying to check in with Anton, the father of the family who basically spoke no English.  The farmhouse was a traditional German style house, and we were shown to the top floor that had a 2 bedroom apartment.  This was not ideal for me as the ceiling was very low unless you stayed in the middle of the apartment.  Needless to say, we both ended up banging our heads a number of toimes (and generally not lightly!).  We discovered in the morning that the cows basically lived in the house too!  I'm sure it was a barn section of the house, but it was only separated by a normal house door and seem to be part of the same building...


That night we drove down the crazy mountain roads into the town of Berchtesgaden where, after a bit of hunting, we found this great pub, the Hoffbrau Haus.  The place was packed and after we had ordered our meals an Oompa band came in and started playing, just sitting around one of the tables!  I don't think you could have planned a more traditional German meal!  We ended up going there again the next night as it was such a good experience.


The next morning we drove to the amazing mountain lake Konigsee, which is the deepest lake in Germany, although only 1.5km wide and 7km long, the lake is surrounded by steep cliffs that continue down under the water, with the deepest section being some 200m.  The water is beautifully clear and to keep it that way only electric motors (and rowboats) have been allowed on it since 1908.  We caught one of the electric boats on a tour to the ancient church of St Bartholomew (40mins away), this has been around since since the 1100's or something like that. 


During the trip, they stop the boat next to one of the cliffs called “Echowall” and one of the conductors played a tune on the trumpet.  Apparently they used to fire a gun and it would echo 7 times, the trumpet only echoed 2-3 times.  In the boat on the way back we met a little boy who wanted to ask us lots of questions and didn't really comprehend that we didn't speak German.  Luckily his older brother and Grandmother spoke enough English to translate.  He couldn't believe we had travelled for 24 hours to get to Germany.  His brother was more impressed that we were driving a Mercedes as our hire car.. After the boat trip, we soon discovered that almost nothing is open on Sundays, so we drove into Salzburg to try and figure out what we would do the next day.

We woke on Monday to a snow storm and had some fun driving back down the steep, narrow, winding roads in the snow and made it into Salzburg just in time for the Sound of Music tour.  The weather meant that it was pretty hard to see some of the sights of the tour, but we did see the Captain's house, the glasshouse, the nunnery and then drove into the mountains to see the church where the wedding was held.  Of course the music was put on for the driving and we sang along with an American family to the words.  After the 4 hour tour, we headed off in the heavily falling snow to go up to the Hohensalzburg fortress on another furnicular train.  While we were inside the fortress the weather suddenly cleared up and we could actually see the sites of Salzburg.  Up until then it had been very hard to see anything.  We walked past Mozart's birthplace, but Charlie was getting tired so we didn't go in.  Driving home the snow had been fairly heavy in the alps and we had a bit of trouble getting back up the road.  Last night we bought some things to make a little dinner in the apartment.  Overnight another snow storm raged and almost a foot of snow fell.  On our way out this morning we had to drive very carefully to make sure we didn't skid off the roads!


We are now on the train from Salzburg to Vienna for the last 2 nights of our trip.

Some more photos from Berchtesgaden and Salzburg:

Berchtesgaden

Innsbruck

On Friday we drove from Schwangau up through the alps to Innsbruck.  The GPS in the car took us a very scenic route through some amazing mountain roads and villages.  We went straight to Swarovski Crystal World, which is ina the town of Wattens, 20km out of Innsbruck.  This was one of the attractions Jo was looking forward to.  The main gallery was filled with interesting things that we were weren't expecting, but when we reached the shop it was filled with sparkling, shiny crystals everywhere.  You could buy everything from crystal encrusted elephants, chandeliers, t-shirts and of course jewellery.  We had a quick lunch and then went and browsed.  In the end Jo was not as tempted as I had expected and only bought a few small things.


We then drove back to Innsbruck to find our hotel.  We had found a hotel that apparently had an apartment up the road, but when we got there and found the apartment, it smelled like someone had used it as a smoke house!  So we decided to just get a normal (non-smoking) hotel room and have Charlotte in the same room.  We were supposed to stay 2 nights, but decided we would go to our next place a day early.  That night we walked down to the old town and saw the Golden Roof (blink and you'll miss it!), and had some Thai for dinner.


The next morning we caught the furnicular train up to the Alpine Zoo, where we saw some interesting animals including, marmotts, wolves, vultures, moose, and a baby wild boar.  From there we continued up the mountain, catching a cable car up to the top.  It was snowing like crazy and so we stayed inside and had some lunch.  I went out and took some photos and saw some sort of flying fox and realised that there was still even further to travel up the mountain.  The snow flakes are amazing and actually look like they are depicted.  I've never seen this in Australia, but then I guess we don't really have much snow!  We then headed back down the mountain and drove to Berchtesgaden south of Salzburg.


More photos from Innsbruck:

Innsbruck

Neuschwanstein & Schwangau

Thursday was Jo's birthday and after having a little celebration in the morning, we drove from Rothenburg down to Schwangau (about 3 hours).  It was snowing when we woke up and got worse as we got onto the Autobahn.  In some parts there was snow on the roads and at one stage we got stuck behind 2 snow plough trucks:


We finally made it to Schwangau where the famous Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau castles are.  The Neuschwanstein is supposedly the castle that the "Disney Castle" is based off.  It was still snowing and very misty so a bit hard to see (and photograph):


  Neuschwanstein                      Hohenschwangau


We had some lunch and then went for a tour inside Hohenschwangau (apparently Neuschwanstein is boring inside as it was never really finished).  This took a while as we had to walk 15-20 mins up a hill to get to the castle (and back down), so after all this we went and found our apartment for the night.
We had booked a place called Haus Luna, which is a traditional German style house with a few different apartments inside.  This was lovely as we had a 2 bedroom apartment with kitchen and lounge room.  Much better than hotel rooms!  That night we walked up the road in the snow to a place for dinner where they were very intrigued when I asked for a scoop of ice cream with my cake.  The lady looked at me strangely and said "You want the ice cream with the cake?  On the same plate?!"
I think I might have started a revolution.


Some more photos from Schwangau:

Schwangau

We now have only a few nights left before we leave, so I might have to post other pictures when we get home.

After Schwangau we drove to Innsbruck and saw the Swarovski Crystal World, Aplen Zoo and went up the mountain.

We are now staying in a farmhouse in the mountains 20 minutes south of Salzburg. It has been snowing almost the whole time, and the owners only speak very limited English.  It has been very challenging, but an amazing experience!

German Fortress Towns

Here are some photos from Dinkehlsbuhl and Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany.  Some of the pictures have descriptions:

German Fortress Towns