Two Days in Vienna

As promised, here's one of two posts that will close out how we spent our time in Austria.Being so close to Vienna, Diane and I really wanted to get a chance to see part of this famous city. As we setup our schedule with my cousin Sabine, we quickly found that a trip to Vienna was going to be a little tough to do with her since she had a few commitments during the week. So we decided it might be best for us to venture to Vienna on our own to check it out.

As it happens, one of my friends from university is staying in Budapest, which is also a couple hour train ride away from Vienna. So when I told him we were going to be in Austria, we made tentative plans to meet up after Christmas in Vienna. Fortunately, this worked out well for us.

So early on Saturday morning, Diane and I waited in the Linz-Ebelsberg train station to catch the 7:00am train to St Valentin, where we transfered onto a train that took us straight into Vienna. We arrived a little less than 3 hours later. It took us a few minutes to get our bearings before we found the right way to go, and it was just a 3 block walk to our hostel for the night. Our room was ready so we checked in and left to find Mike near the university in Vienna.

Our plan for the day was pretty simple: we had downloaded an mp3 friendly audio tour called "Vienna: Hidden Corners of the First District". The starting location was where we met up with Mike, and we started out on what turned out to be a fantastic audio tour. If you're ever in Vienna and are looking for a good way to walk around the downtown core as a way to get familiar with it, and see a bunch of cool things along the way, I highly recommend this tour. We met Mike around 11am, and got started pretty soon after that - and we were at the tour for most of the day (with a few rest stops along the way, including lunch).

The tour was composed of 22 parts, and took us through some very interesting corners of Vienna. Early on in the tour, the guide had us go into a nondescript tailor's shop and ask to see the cellar -- apparently something this particular store would be asked a lot, because the lady waved us to a staircase saying something similar to "of course!". The cellar was amazing, with stairs and chambers leading us around quite a ways before we ran into a spot where the owners had blocked further exploring. According to the tour guide, these underground chambers lead quite a ways under Vienna. It was pretty cool! Even at this early stage in the tour, we all felt the money we paid for the audio tour was well spent.

The tour continued on to point out several remnants of the Roman empire, and led us on to a church where a lifesize mosaic replica of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper on the wall. The mosaic weighs an astounding 20 tons, and what amazed us the most was that it was done at such a resolution that from the ground, we couldn't tell that it was a mosaic. Apparently Napoleon had commissioned the mosaic be made so that he could take an original back to Paris with him. When it was completed, however, Napolean had already been defeated and eventually it ended up in this relatively small church in Vienna.

Our guide then led us through several more interesting facts and features of Vienna on to a side street and an unassuming doorway to a pub. Just inside, you go down a couple flights of stairs at which point the room opens up into an absolutely incredible arched ceiling cellar which was formerly used to store wine. Now, it makes probably the best atmosphere pub I've ever been in. We stopped in there for a beer and to enjoy the atmosphere, as we totally felt it was required to do!

A little while later, the guide had us walk up to a private looking door set in the side of a road, and open it to reveal a narrow passageway which eventually opened up into a Renaissance courtyard dating back to the 1500s. Already, the tour had paid for itself by showing us several parts of Vienna we would never have found on our own.

The rest of the tour pointed out several other details of Vienna including what is apparently the oldest underground public conveniences (restrooms), an old church where part of the inside plaster on the walls had been stripped away to reveal the previous stylings of the church, and some interesting details at the city's famous St. Stephen's church. We ended our tour not far from where we started it, at the gates to the Hofburg palace grounds.

Mike had a couple hours left before he had to go catch his train back to Budapest, so we made the most of it by walking around the Hofburg grounds. At this point it was dark out and the grand buildings were all lit up beautifully. It was a stunning sight. After stopping to take some photographs, we wandered our way eventually back to the train station where we waited for Mike's train in a cafe there. We wished him a good journey back and were on our own in Vienna for the evening and the next day!

It had been a bit of a long day for us though, so we didn't really feel up to doing much other than finding a place to eat dinner and retiring to sleep. The person who ran the hostel suggested we try out a little restaurant down the road from the hostel. It was a charming little Italian restaurant which we enjoyed quite a bit. Maybe the food wasn't incredible, but the waiter (whom I presume owns the place) was really charming in the way he sat down with us to explain the menu specials in his Italian accented English. We had some nice wine with dinner and tried out some Sachertorte (traditional Austrian chocolate cake) and ApfelStreusel (apple streudel) for dessert. Of the two, I actually preferred the apple streudel: it was warm and really quite tasty!

The next morning, we returned to the Hofburg grounds to attempt to see the Spanish riding horses show that morning. Unfortunately, it was all sold out except for two 135 euro tickets (each!). Instead of doing that, we left and stopped for a bite of breakfast at a nearby cafe and decided on a backup plan. Eventually we decided to check out the Austrian imperial palace: Shonbrunn. When we got there, we were dismayed by the long line up entering the palace, and decided to check out the grounds for awhile with the hope that the line would be gone when we returned. Quickly, we discovered that the palace grounds were HUGE! One could easily get lost in there. For the next hour and a half or so we wandered around the grounds just a tad in awe of the scale of the whole thing. It was a bit unfortunate that we were there in the winter -- the trees and plants were bare, and would probably look stunning in the spring/summer or fall. Still, there was lots to see including a long climb up past one set of statues to another building far up the hill that looked down on the Palace and a magnificient view of Vienna. From there, we wandered back down the hill and back around to the front of the palace to see if the line up had died down a bit. Thankfully, the lineup had disappeared into the building!

So the next thing to do was explore the palace. The tour with an accompanying audio guide was actually quite interesting. Two things really stood out for me. The first was the incredible scale of the place and the amount of decoration that went into each room. Every single room that we entered had a particular theme to the decor, and the people who were in charge of decorating the rooms did not stop at anything. Every detail was thought of and covered. Some themed rooms included Asian lacquered panelling, blue and white painted walls and decoration to imitate porcelain, and the use of rare and expensive wood panelling. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to take my camera in, so I don't have any photos. The second thing that stood out for me was the tremendous amount of history behind the building. The audio tour provided with the admission rattled off several years and historical figures to the point that it turned into a blur of history. I'm going to have to spend some time reading about the history of Austria on wikipedia now! For an example of what I mean, the tour guide would say something like "Napolean stayed in this room when he stayed in Vienna in year XXXX". And it would be like that for many of the rooms.

The tour took about an hour, at which point we thought we'd return to downtown Vienna to ride the tram around town just to see the town a little bit before we sought dinner. Diane remembered a restaurant mentioned on the audio tour we took the previous day that had looked rather cozy, so we returned there to eat an early dinner before our train back to Linz. The food was fantastic, and the place was warm and cozy. It was a wonderful way to end our short trip to Vienna.

A couple of impressions we had on our short stay there. The transit was truly one of the nicest things about the city. It was incredibly easy to get around town on the numerous trams and underground lines that go through the city. On a less positive note, Austria is a lot more lax about where you can smoke -- meaning that many of the restaurants we went to during our stay were smokey which detracted a bit from the atmosphere in my opinion. Vienna is a wonderfully ornate city with most buildings looking beautiful in the crisp winter air. There's a lot to see there, and we'll definitely have to return to check out some of the public parks, the museums, and more tourist attractions!

We negotiated the train route back to Linz successfully although there was a little bit of running just to make sure we caught the next train on the two transfers we had to do on the return journey. The first leg was the longest and it was in a comfy new looking double-decker train - the likes of which I didn't know existed. So Diane and I sought seats on the upper deck, partly for the novelty of the experience.

We arrived at our stop at Linz on time to discover that Kien had come to pick us up at the station. The walk back to his place wasn't too long, but he decided to drive up and pick us up there anyways, which was thoughtful and nice of him to do!

So that was our short trip to Vienna. It was fun, and everything went pretty smoothly which was good for our first foray into continental Europe by ourselves!

Year in Review 2008

This has been a very busy year for Diane and I (to put it mildly). Any year that you get married or move to another country or score a decisive victory for computers against humans is bound to be a pretty busy year ... but these were just a sampling of some of the things that happened to us during the past twelve months. This is my year in review. (You can find my year in review from last year here and Diane's here). The outlook on 2008 was pretty exciting. Diane and I had become engaged in May of 2007 and our wedding date was setup as the June 7, 2008. So one thing we would be spending a bunch of time working on for the first half of the year was planning that. I was still working at the university for the computer poker research group. Having come so close to beating some very good poker players the year before in Vancouver, we were itching for a rematch. Finally, two people I knew were already working in a company in Ireland, and I had started to consider what it would be like to do the same.

So lets get started, shall we? Early on in January, a group of us ended up at the museum to do some photographing. With how the busy the year would become, I'm sad that we didn't get more outings like this because it was a lot of fun! Later on in the month, the annual department ski trip to Jasper was once again a highlight of the year. The people from the CS department at the UofA are a lot of fun to hang out with, and at this point I definitely suspected that this would be my last trip to join the department for the forseeable future.

In February, Sonata Arctica -- one of my favourite bands, came to town so I was ecstatic to check that out. Later on that month, we went on a ski trip to Lake Louise and Sunshine with a couple of friends. That was a great trip, and filled with many good photographs.

In March, my grandparents celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary and my grandpa turned 80. To help celebrate, we went down to Rimbey to surprise my grandfather with a big party. My sister played her harp, and it was a lovely time.

April's big event was going to Dublin to interview at PocketKings. The company generously flew both of us out to Dublin to meet the team I would eventually join. It was a packed 5 days, with two of those days being travel. I spent two days in the office and a third wandering around Dublin with Darse, Xan, Mike, MK, and Aaron. We were out for dinner all three nights we were there, met quite a few people, and saw a lot of things. Not long after we returned home, I was offered a job with them and pretty soon we were not only planning a wedding, but planning moving our lives across the Atlantic ocean to Dublin, Ireland.

In May, we had a packed social schedule which combined with getting ready for the wedding made it a busy month! Nightwish, another one of my favourite bands came to town, we attended dinner parties, brithday parties, and got out on another photoshoot this time in Edmonton's river valley. I also attended a meetup of Edmonton Flickr people, as well as a separate outing with Edmonton Twitter members. May was a very busy month!

The big highlight of June was our wedding day on the 7th. Thanks to the help of many, many people, we were able to put together a pretty good day I would have to say. Diane was radiant all day, and we both managed to get through the day with no bigger mishaps than us forgetting to write a speech for the dinner. Highlights from the day are in this post, but really the highlight of the whole thing was of course being married to such a wonderful person in Diane.

Because of the computer poker research group's efforts to have a rematch against some top human players in July, work prevented us from leaving on a honeymoon right away. Instead, we settled in and attempted to get some of the details for moving to Ireland sorted out. We also attempted to see as many people as we could, which meant that one thing we had to do was go see my grandparents in Rimbey. As always, it was quite a pleasant trip. Lots of food, games and good company. I really don't see them enough!

On July 1st, we left for Las Vegas, where for the next several days we would prepare, run, and eventually win the match against several very good human players including one of the best in the world: Matt "Hoss_TBF" Hawrilenko. It was a lot of work building up to that point, but it was a wonderful bit of closure to get before I left the group. A week after we arrived in Vegas, the work portion of our trip had ended and the vacation/honeymoon part of it started. We spent a few days hanging out with some of the research group members in Las Vegas before flying to San Diego where we spent a day at the San Diego Zoo before getting on our honeymoon cruise.

The cruise was a 5 day affair starting from San Diego and stopping in Cabo San Lucas on the way down the west coast and then in Ensenada on the way back. The highlight of the trip was the excursions, where we did a zipline and climbing wall excursion down a canyon in Cabo, and a kayaking trip in Ensenada. The food on board was pretty good too...

We returned to Edmonton where we had just a week left to pack up all our belongings and spend as much time with our families as we could before heading off to Dublin. It was a pretty surreal experience packing all our stuff up and saying goodbye to everyone. Late in the week we had a party at my parent's place where we had a huge number of friends and family over to say goodbye to. It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad so many people turned out! Before we knew it, we were packed up and on a plane to Dublin, Ireland!

In our first weeks in Dublin, in late July and early August, we had a bunch of hoops to jump through in order to get the required documents to stay in the country, and find a place to live so we could get a bank account and all those other little details. Thanks to a bunch of help from Darse who had recently made the transition, we got everything sorted through in record time. Within two weeks of our arrival we had an apartment, internet, a bank account, and immigration cleared for our first year.

Also in August, we went on our first road trip with Darse and Xan who took us to the Powerscourt gardens. We would do several more trips with them including exploring Killiney hill right here in Dublin, going to county Wicklow in September, the Southern coast of Ireland and the Irish National Stud in October.

Work got busy in November, which made me feel like not doing too much on the weekends other than relax. But December was an eventful month! It started off with our friend JR coming to visit us for a couple of days. We showed as much of Dublin as we could while he was here, and hope he enjoyed it! Just after he left, we were off to Kilkenny where the company held one heck of a Christmas party. A couple weeks later, Diane and I were at the Dublin airport crazy early for a holiday in Austria. We spent 10 days there over Christmas, and enjoyed ourselves immensely (the posts for the rest of our trip are coming still, I promise!).

This year has been amazing, and it's hard to imagine that 2009 will top it. I closed one chapter of my life (working at the university), and opened several more (getting hitched, moving to a new country, starting a new job). That said, Diane and I have the opportunity to explore Europe while we're young and we're sure planning on doing as much of that as we can in the coming year. Work is going well, and I'm happy with how much I've been able to contribute. So we're excited to see what 2009 will offer us!

To close out, here's some maybe interesting numbers from this year:

• I took around 10,000 photographs with my camera this year, far surpassing the previous year's total of less than 7,000. From that selection of photographs, I uploaded 1448 to Flickr for your enjoyment. I hope you've gotten a chance to take a look at my work.

• Despite having not had much time to play poker this year, I still did better than 2007 in terms of total profit. I earned $6300 in online poker in 2008, bringing my lifetime earnings to over $12,000.

• My passport has been stamped 11 times, 8 of which happened in 2008.

• We've posted 55 times (not including this one) to this blog, and these posts have accrued 33 comments. All but two of those posts happened in 2008.

• Number of countries I've been in this year: 6... four of which were knew to me: Mexico, Ireland, Austria, and England (albeit only in the London airport).

• Number of months living abroad: 5.

Any other numbers you can think of that might be interesting that I might be able to rattle off without too much counting? If I get some good suggestions I'll add them to the post.

Lastly, here's some of my favourite photos from 2008:

Megan finally let me photograph her for her recital poster.

A beautiful shot of Irish countryside with no one around.

A duck in St Fiachra's Garden near Kildare, Ireland.

A sight seen on the Hofburg palace grounds in Vienna, Austria.

Beautiful lighting over Pichling lake in Austria.

David Thue is the one in the pipe, and he makes a fun silhouette with his hat.

I took photos of these flamingos for quite awhile before getting this shot.

One of my favourites from the wedding photos that Jason Kasumovic took.

A view of Sunshine mountain village.

A scene from Canmore, Alberta.

I hope everyone had a good 2008. Whether you did or not, I hope that 2009 is a good year for you!

Morgan

A Quiet Christmas (relatively)

We had quite a relaxing Christmas. After spending the first couple of days in Austria touring Salzburg and Linz, the speed of our tourist activities slowed down for Christmas eve and day. On Christmas eve, we slept in (as we would do most of the week really), hung around Kien's place for awhile before Kien took us to Enns -- which is the oldest town in Austria, and only a few minutes drive from Linz. The biggest feature of Enns is the giant clock/watchtower in the center square. This tower soars above the town, and was incredibly built back in the 1500s. The cool thing was that even though there was nobody there (it was Christmas eve, afterall!), the tower remained open with an honour system collection box for the two euro entry fee. We gladly paid it as the climb to the top of the tower was totally worth the view! The inside of the tower had a pretty steep staircase wrapping the inside walls of the tower, but we climbed it with little trouble.Once back on the ground, we continued to explore the town of Enns -- walking into an old mansion courtyard and then on to a lookout point to see an outlook onto the river that flows through town.

We returned back to Linz to find that one part of the family had already arrived for the family dinner. In Austria, Christmas is mostly celebrated on the eve. My Austrian relatives had prepared a common Chinese feast in the form of a hotpot. In this meal, the table is filled with plates full of uncooked meats, noodles and vegetables which surround a hot plate with a pot of soup stock. During the meal, you choose food you'd like to eat and toss it into the pot and wait for it to cook before rescuing it with chopsticks or a basket. The meal is interactive, and actually quite a lot of fun -- not to mention tasty too!

Diane had spent some time wrapping up the pile of gifts we had brought with us from Ireland the previous night, and we had people open them. Before we knew it, it was late and we retired for the evening.

The big plan on Christmas day was to ... well ... not do much. We had setup a date to connect through Skype with a party my mom was having at her place with all the Chinese relatives in Edmonton. That wasn't until 9:00pm though in Austria, so we had most of the day to kill, and we really didn't do all that much. It's because of this downtime that I managed to get a bunch of photos up from the first few days of the trip. It wasn't until the afternoon when we decided to go for a walk. Diane and I had just planned to walk around SolarCity some more, but Kien took us a few minutes away to a nearby lake which was absolutely gorgeous in the dimming light. The water of the lake was crystal clear, and was reflecting a gorgeous shade of silvery blue. We even were greeted by a couple swans that were out on the cold lake. Purely wonderful. The walk around the lake was about 3.5km (according to the signage around the lake). It was good to get out and walk around -- particularly the overabundance of food we were getting fed from the family!

That evening, we hooked up on Skype first with Diane's family for a short bit to say Merry Christmas (sorry about the short length!), and then with my family in Edmonton where there was a series of people who all made an appearance to say hi to my Aunt, Kien, Lillian, and the new baby Marisa. By the time this all was over, it was late and we were tired (from eating?) and retired for the night.

On "Boxing Day" (it's not called that in Europe), we didn't have much planned either, but ending up going into Linz with Kien to walk around a bit. It was a chilly, cloudy day in Linz -- much like it had been all week really. The town was pretty much shut down for the day with very few establishments open, and the ones that were were awfully quiet. Still, we did get to see some of Linz's sights. One of our stops was an incredible church. From the outside, it was tall and ornate, but the truly jaw dropping experience doesn't happen until you step inside -- where the church's incredibly high arched ceiling towers above you, and the tall stained glass windows glow. I could feel my mouth hang open as we walked around inside the church, and as might be obvious to you at this moment, am still amazed at it.

After exiting the church, it was starting to get dark, but continued our way along to a museum which was unfortunately closing right away so we didn't get to go inside. We didn't, however, miss a pretty nice view with city lights glittering across the surface of the Danube river.

Eventually we decided to go have dinner at a sushi bar/mongolian bbq place. It was decent, but the nicest thing about it was the price really. Actually, that's one thing we've noticed while we've been in Austria -- compared to Dublin, it's pretty cheap! Stuff like the all-you-can-eat buffet we had that night was far cheaper than we could imagine seeing in Dublin, and this appeared to follow for just about everything we've seen in Austria so far. We've heard a few times that the prices in Ireland and the UK are the most expensive in the EU. Well, we've seen some pretty hard evidence in three cities in Austria anyways.

So that was our pretty quite Christmas. Up next, our short two day trip to Vienna and meeting up with a good friend there!

Morgan

Days 3 and 4 in Linz

It's been a busy couple of days! Yesterday, my cousin Sabine and her mom came and got us and this time we took the tram into town. From Solarcity, it takes about half an hour or so to get into town. We got off in town and were immediately surrounded by yet another set of Christmas booths -- it seems that one of the things Austrians love to do is setup markets around Christmas time. I hear the Christkindlmarkt in Vienna is something to see, but I guess we won't get to see that one. But having seen the ones in Salzburg and Linz now gives us some idea of what to expect. It's a fun atmosphere with people selling many different food, clothing, and arts and crafts. There's some fun traditional food as well, that we would try that day as well. In Linz, there are two locations (that we saw anyways) where the markets were setup. The first place we stopped was the first one and then we walked up the main street a ways to the second. En route, we stopped at a grocery store (where we may have purchased some Austrian chocolate ...), and at a bookstore where there was a fair number of English books as well as German ones. We continued up the main street there (I'm not too sure if it is *the* main street, but it was pretty busy and it is where all the trams run up and down the length of the city). We got to the other market and this is where we tried some kind of sausage in a bun (the name escapes me now) with some sort of spicy ketchup. It was rather tasty! We continued on and tried Kirshpunsch (cherry juice mixed with warm wine - very tasty) and a pastry kind of resembling a doughnut, but not quite. Dented in the center and deep fried, they are served with jam in the middle and are also quite tasty (although I'm sure terrible for you!).

After trying some of these delicacies, we bid farewell to Sabine's mother and Sabine took us on a bus up a hill that would let us overlook Linz. The bus ride took about 15 minutes and we were soon looking over the city. The view was a bit obscured by the cloudy sky which was a bit unfortunate, but even with that, it was a pretty nice view. We wandered around the top of the hill for awhile taking photos and then caught the bus back down again. Apparently the bus isn't the normal way to go up there -- but they are upgrading the train that would normally take us up there. The bus dropped us off back in city center next to the market place again. From there, we walked a little ways to the nearby art gallery.

We went inside and had a look around. It was pretty cheap to get in, so we walked around and looked at some of the art. I'm not really much of an art fan most of the time, but there was some neat stuff there to see. It was enjoyable though, and certainly not a waste of time. Probably the neatest thing about the art gallery was the building itself. A new building, the gallery itself is elevated with two "legs" for support. It is quite striking, but tough to describe. The outer walls are glass with words written on them which kind of make the walls glitter a little when you pass by it. About two or three feet behind the glass, the building is mostly concrete within. Strange and interesting to look at, that's for sure!

After checking out the art gallery, we headed back to the tram and took it back to Solarcity to have dinner with Kien's family. They cooked us up a big batch of chili con carne which was pretty satisfying after a day in the wind and rain and relative chill of Austrian winter.

The next morning, we accompanied Kien and his mother to do some shopping. We hit up some discount grocery stores, and we were amazed at how cheap some stuff was compared to Dublin. In particular, the wine on the store shelves was ranging in price from 1.69 to 2.50 euro or so. I don't know if any of it was any good, but it was cheap! We dropped off the groceries and then went back out and walked around Linz's big mall for awhile. It was an interesting experience. Unlike malls in Edmonton or Dublin, people are free to smoke anywhere they like in the mall, which was a little odd and not too pleasant. But people were pretty cheerful and the atmosphere was pretty nice. Because it was just before Christmas, there were tons of vendors lining the walls and/or down the center of the mall. There was a lot of variety in the things to look at!

After wandering for awhile it was getting late for lunch and we started to get hungry. We tried out an all you can eat sushi restaurant -- one where the offerings came by your table on conveyer belts and you just grabbed whatever you wanted. We were a little surprised to find out that it was an all-you-can-eat style rather than similar ones in Vancouver and Dublin we've seen where you pay by the plate. There wasn't a lot of sushi there, but it was tasty. There was a lot of other asian food as well like spring rolls, fried rice, and other stuff. It was all pretty good and we probably ate too much.

We journeyed back home and relaxed for a little while. Our plans for the evening were to meet up with Sabine and her husband in town to enjoy the markt on the last night before Christmas to drink more punsch, eat more of those doughnuts and otherwise enjoy the atmosphere. So that's what we did! We enjoyed some more kirshpunsch, and stood around a table with Kien, Sabine and her husband, as well as one of Kien's school friends and his wife and chatted for awhile. We then moved on to a bar called Punsch Tempel, where we tried another drink called Jobär. It was another sweet fruity drink similar to punsch, but I guess made with vodka instead of wine. Tasty and warm, and probably pretty dangerous as you can't really tell there's alchohol in them!

The big day for Christmas here is Christmas eve, so there will be a big gathering tomorrow to have lots of food. So that's what we'll be doing then!

Morgan

First Days in Austria

On December 20th, early in the morning, Diane and I made our first trek into continental Europe together. Our plane was supposed to leave at 6:20am, which is entirely too early! We had a plan: to catch the still running night-luas (during Christmas weekends, the tram line runs until 3:30am) a couple stops over to catch the Aircoach -- a comfortable and cheap way to get to the airport. Unfortunately, as we were walking towards the place where the aircoach picks people up, we saw it turn the corner and leave, and the next one didn't get there for another hour that early in the morning. So instead, we caught a taxi that was conveniently coming by and took that to the airport instead -- getting there ridiculously early: 3:30am! They hadn't even opened security up at the airport yet ... they did that at 4am. Salzburg is a short 2 hour direct flight from Dublin. Both Diane and I slept most of the way there, but not without missing sunrise on the plane. I didn't get any pictures though - the sunrise was more to the front of us than the side of us.

We arrived in Salzburg and had no issues claiming our baggage and going through customs and were greeted by two of my cousins. Our first stop was a small bakery in the airport for some Austrian style buns. They were fresh, warm, and tasty! The plan for us was to wander around Salzburg a bit before heading home to Linz ... so we drove into town from the little Salzburg airport and found a parking spot and started wandering around a bit on foot. We wandered into the Christkindlmarkt, which is an amazingly large Christmas market. There were booths selling arts and crafts, food, hot drinks, and all kinds of other stuff! Salzburg is a rather charming town, with lots of old buildings. One of its easily seen features is the Festung Hohensalzburg - a huge castle/fortress on top of a hill overlooking Salzburg. To get up there, you can either walk up or take a railcar up a very steep slope. We tried the railcar and it was pretty cool -- I sure hope those cars have good brakes!

There sure was a lot to see in the castle! Tons of displays and information to absorb about the castle. It was built over several hundred years, with a lot of the wealth required to do so coming from the salt trade. We learned that the castle had never been taken by force, but it had been surrendered to Napolean.

After walking around the castle grounds for quite some time, we found the railcars again and headed back down to the town where we walked back through town a bit and visited Mozart's birthplace. At first, this little museum felt a little underwhelming with the first few rooms seeming a little odd. But the museum was actually quite a bit more extensive than we first thought and we explored several rooms detailing quite a bit of information about Mozart's life. The requisite gift shop had quite a few Mozart themed items including Mozart perfume (eww?), Mozart chocolates, and of course, Mozart t-shirts.

We explored that museum for awhile and then went back out to the street where our cousins looked for a place for us to eat at. We ended up at a charming Austrian pub called Sternbraeu. There we tasted austrian beer (Kaiser), and had some tasty Austrian food: Diane had some incredibly tender deer stew, and I tried Wiener Schnitzel. Both were excellent and tasty and made for a nice end to our explorations of Salzburg.

The drive to Linz (where all my Austrian relatives live) is about an hour and a half, and Diane and I were both pretty sleepy on the ride home. We arrived and said hi to everyone and soon after that we were eating again! I have a feeling this trip will involve lots of food.

Both Diane and I were pretty tired so we got to bed early and slept in which was quite nice. The next day was pretty quiet and relaxing. We got up late, and after a bit of breakfast my cousin Kien showed us around SolarCity: the development that he lives in on the outskirts of Linz. The development is pretty neat -- they have a bunch of buildings that are built to conserve energy and most of the buildings have solar panels on top to help supplement the energy supply. It's quite a new place, built in the last 5 years or so, but it's pretty cool.

We walked around for a little while and then returned back to the house where we had some lunch, and met up with the rest of the family. We spent a little time planning out the next few days and then my cousin Sabine and her husband took us into Linz to see a little bit of the city. The city was alive with more Christmas markets. Our destination though this night was a little candle-making place which was pretty cool. We got to make our own candles by starting with the wick and dipping it into pots of hot liquid wax repeatedly until we got a desired thickness. Our candles didn't quite turn out as nicely as I might've liked -- no one told us how fast we should dip them, so we went a bit too fast. Our candles are a bit bumpy, but it was still great fun! Some people were doing some pretty neat things with the wax! It was a great atmosphere, and a surprising amount of fun.

After our candle making foray, we attempted to go have dinner, but were thwarted by closed restaurants (many of them aren't open on Sundays or open only from Tuesday through Saturday. Eventually we did find a place to eat though ... and after we made our order we quickly learned that the portions at this restaurant were *enourmous*! Each of us got a large frying pan full of food -- which none of us finished entirely. Mine had Roast beef, ham, a white bread dumpling, and an egg/potato thing stuffed with little chopped pieces of ham on top of saurkraut. Diane had bratwurst sausages with potatoes and saurkraut. It was all very tasty, but also quite plentiful!

We returned to Solarcity stuffed and happy and quite relaxed! So that was our first two days in Austria. There's a lot more to come, but I'm tired so I'll write more when I next get the chance.

Morgan