Austria: no kangaroos

After much procrastination and no updating on it... Thanksgiving weekend was Austrian!

Jessie and I took an overnighter to Innsbruck on Wednesday, milking our loong weekend. Innsbruck is STUNNING. The Alps there have to be the 100% best I've seen so far. It's kind of funny-- I've seen the Alps 5 or 6 times this semester, yet it NEVER gets old. They are so beautiful. Stepping on the platform and seeing these bright blue, spiky white-covered peaks (especially snowy because, hi, Austria is cold and snowy) was nothing short of surreal. Ethereal beauty. Somehow the spiky peaks stretched on into the horizon and honestly, I felt like I had stepped into a Christmas card. On the way to Innsbruck we had looked out the window and seen a thick blanket of SNOW covering the ground, but breathing the icy air and seeing those gorgeous Alps made it so much more real. I fell in love with Innsbruck on first sight, which had only happened with Italia and Ukraina so far in my life. Stunning.

After a brief stint in Innsbruck, we took a train to Salzburg, which is a few hours away. That train ride was mostly filled with frantic picture-taking and extreme (probably extremely annoying) enthusiasm from my end. I can't even imagine what the commuters on the train thought of me and my huge camera snapping away from inside the train. I couldn't help it! Austria is just that gorgeous. And snowy. That was a first.

We arrived in Salzburg on Thanksgiving, settled into our hostel and decided that we were starving, so we set out to find a café or something. Instead we found an open-air market (so typical of Europe) and Jessie bought real apfelstrudel and I got this incredible bananoshoken kuchen thing.. basically a chocolate cake topped with a thick banana cream and then a layer of chocolate. Sooooooo good. Instead of going on a touristy Sound of Music tour that would have cost us 40 euros eaach, we decided to go see the Mozart house, which is the very house in which Wolfgang Amadeus composed and lived as a child and into his early adulthood. The house is really cool because it's a museum with lots of listening exhibits, so you listen to a lot of beautiful arrangements of Mozart's countless works. Very cool. Salzburg is a very charming city- the river cuts through it and it's just very picturesque and clean. Definitely worth a visit if you're in the area. While we were visiting Mirabell Palace (where Mozart played) we saw signs for a private concert happening that evening and decided to spend money on a concert we couldn't really afford or dress appropriately for. The concert was some lady in her 30s on the violin. Apparently she's first chair in the national orchestra, no big. Needless to say, Mirabell Palace is possibly the best place to experience something like a private violin concert accompanied by a pianist who wasn't so bad herself. It was awesome. Went back totally thrilled (and freeeeeezing). Earlier we had eaten Thanksgiving dinner at an Austrian restaurant-- bratwurst, sauerkraut, and potatoes...

The next day we explored more of Salzburg, climbed to a lookout point of the city (conveniently located just near the abbey where the Sound of Music nuns actually lived!!) and I photographed a stunning overlook of Salzburg and the surrounding Alps. There aren't even words. Caught a train to Vienna, which again was an incredibly scenic ride-- snow and hills and Alps and sheep and houses and more houses and fields.. overall I'd say it was a little less hilly and Alp-y than the ride from Innsbruck to Salzburg, but duh- look at a topographical map and you shall see your answer pretty easily. It's northeastern end of the Alps' range.
So we got to Vienna. This was a few action-packed days. We saw so much! Most importantly, however, we partook in the (horribly expensive but worth it) Viennese café culture. The Viennese have always been very big on sitting in a gilded, mirrored, ornate café for hours on end with their coffee and a newspaper. In fact, people have been known to write entire books in these cafés, and entire pieces of music. Just like that. No big. A lot of them are pretty historic and um, GORGEOUS, too. With the most fabulous cakes and pastries you have ever seen in your life, except for maybe those in France. The first thing we did in Vienna was walk down their main street (bundled up, whoa) and find Demel, a really really famous café/pasticceria known for their cakes. YESSSSSSSS. So we devoured this chocolate mousse layer cake, which was actually one of the richest things I've ever eaten. This mousse wasn't your typical American mousse. It was pretty dense for a mousse and you could practically taste the chocolate dust melting in your mouth through the fluffy heavy cream-- it was also relatively solid for a mousse. Very, very, very rich- and I almost didn't finish mine (anyone who knows my eating habits should be impressed). We walked around a lot, saw the Christmas lights, found the main Christkindlemarket, and just fell in love with romantic Wien.

The next morning we woke up and headed toward Haus der Musik, a music museum! It was great! I composed my own Viennese waltz and Jessie conducted a virtual orchestra in a Mozart piece, and we both listened to a ton of exhibits on the physics/science aspects of sound and music and also saw exhibits/heard works by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Handel... just great. It kept the Mozart theme going in our weekend. Vienna was really all about cake, coffee, Mozart, music, Alps, and.........Christkindlemarkets! Onward..

Christkindlemarket. AWESOME. Think a huuuge market with tons of booths, like hundreds, all selling ornaments, scarves, mulled wine, bier steins, statuettes, jewelery, and any Christmas-related thing you could ever imagine or want. But not tacky stuff- all handmade, gorgeous, Austrian. The colors and sounds and smells just made it the kind of place that you could hang out in for days- and we kind of did. The food was quite excellent there-- lots of sausages and apple desserts, mulled wine, punsch, popcorn, candied nuts, strange Austrian pastries, chocolate-covered bananas, strawberries, cookies, etc etc etc.. anything excellent and tasty and probably terrible for you. YAY! I ended up buying a few presents and eating a lot of food there. And photographing it to death!

SUNDAY- sooooooo we were in Vienna, right? Mmm.. what else is in Vienna other than Mozart and cake and markets? Oh, right- the VIENNA BOYS CHOIR. We found out that they sing at this one mass at the Hofburg Palace on Sundays, ended up going, and experienced the wonder that is this small choir of perfect-sounding voices. Somehow I never realized that little boys' voices were so pure and gorgeous, but yea. It was really cool! And they were all so cute. We kind of explored, walked around, ate the rest of the day... and then hopped on our overnighter back to Roma... I shared my carrozza with a family of 5 from Bologna- they were really sweet and we talked for a long time about Italia and the semester and Roma and all kinds of stuff. Their kids were great- Elena, Andrea, and Gaia- and the parents so nice. It was nice not to end this trip with sketchball creepsters :)