Vien, Austria

We arrived in Vien (Vienna) and took a taxi to our hotel. Our driver wasn't the most kind, but that wasn't going to bring us down. We were in Vienna, for crying out loud! :-)
We dropped off our bags, grabbed a map of the city and started walking. Downtown Vienna is a very walkable city. We started at the Opera House. We weren't able to get in to take a tour, so we decided to walk over to the Hofburg Palace and took a tour of the Crown Jewels. Everything was absolutely stunning. After our tour through the museum, Jess went back to the hotel to work a bit and Caitlin and I went to see a show. We saw a Classical music/Ballet/Opera Concert (that was absolutely geared for tourists). The concert was in the Palais Auersperg which is a concert hall famous for being the first place Mozart performed. We felt so cultured and it was great to get a few different art forms in one show. We were definitely happy we went.

On our second day, we went back to the Hofburg Palace to the Spanish Riding School. This was extremely informative and really cool to watch. The trainers work with 4 or 5 different sets of Lippizan horses teaching them dressage. The horses are beautiful and so talented. 

After the training, we walked across the way to the Kaiser Apartments and took the tour of the Imperial Palace, the apartments and walked through the Empress Sisi exhibit. The entire tour was really interesting, very informative and totally cool! 

There is, what seems to be, a circle around the downtown area of Vienna that is very walkable and takes you near all of the major sites. After our tour of the Palace, we walked around the city center to see all of the rest of the sites all while stopping for souvenirs, pictures and to say prayers in all of the churches. 

Vienna was beautiful and full of lots of touring and site seeing. Next stop - Prague.

Salzburg, Austria

Let me first start by explaining the difference between "burg" and "berg"
Burg means fortress Berg means mountain
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We arrived in Salzburg by train from Munich and hopped into a taxi. We learned the above from our taxi driver because he saw that I had spelled Salzburg Salzberg. Amateur move, I know, but we learned something from it at least.
We got to our hotel, checked in and dropped off our bags and asked the front desk where we should go, since we only had the rest of the day in the cute, little city. She suggested that we take the Cable Car Up to the top of Untersbergbahn Mountain. It is the mountain that Maria (Sound of Music) is running through in the opening scene of the movie and it provides the most beautiful views of Salzburg.

We hiked around the top of the mountain, there were a ton of people up there. And then we found a table to join to have some beers and lunch. We sat with some local Austrians who turned into our friends and we ended up toasting a lot with them and they bought us a round of drinks. Everyone was so super nice and the Radlers (beer and lemonade) were so refreshing and delicious.

We took the Cable Car back down and the bus back to the main part of the city to Mirabellgarten. The grounds were beautiful and in full bloom.

We walked over the Salzach River and over to the Augustiner Braustubl. It is one of the largest beer gardens in Europe (if not the biggest) and the beer is brewed out of old wooden barrels and by monks! We walked into the building and it looked like an old church. There were a couple of large halls where you could sit inside, but if you walk through and down a few flights of stairs you end up outside where the tables and beer are. You order your beer from a man behind a register, pick up an unmarked stein, rinse it and then hand it to a monk and they poor the beer for you. It was awesome!

 We walked over to the main cathedral but the square was all set up for Oktoberfest celebrations, so we weren't able to check out the church. We found food for dinner and then went to bed. We left for Vienna the next day. 

Touring München

I was in Munich for just over 4 days and it was jam packed. We went to a futbol match, concentration camp, Oktoberfest and on our last full day we walked around Munich and into a few different parks.  I am a huge fan on clocks. I just love them. In Marienplatz, there is a glockenspiel that chimes at 11am, 12pm and 5pm. We made sure to be in the square at one of the times, along with the other tourists, and watched the show. 

Yes, this was day 2 of wearing our dirndls. When in Munich...

We also were able to walk through a few different gardens around Munich. The weather was perfectly fall. The air was crisp and the sun was warm. 

We walked through the Hofgarten through to a Parliament building where we walked through a WWI & WWII memorial then through Englisher Garten. It reminded me very much of Golden Gate Park or Dolores Park. There were people out picnicking and playing lawn games. The walking path was lovely and we came across a pretty stream and little waterfall. 

 

Munich was beautiful and definitely treated us well. We had a great time and I would definitely go back to Oktoberfest. Maybe not next year...my liver needs more of a break...

München - Dachau

On our first full day in Munich, we visited the Concentration Camp Memorial at Dachau. To be completely honest, I don't have words to describe this visit (which may come as a shock, since I rarely don't have words :-) ). The sky was blue, the air was crisp and the sun was strong. We walked around the memorial site for about 3 hours.

Dachau was classified as a labor camp, one of the first concentration camps to open and quickly became one of the more famous camps based on the type of prisoners and based on the sheer amount of prisons who were interned here. It was was built to house 6,000 people but by the end of WWII there were 30,000 people here.

Again, I don't have many words to describe this experience. I have been to a handful of Holocaust Memorial Sites and Museums, but they don't hold anything to actually visiting a camp. We went on a weekday, during Oktoberfest, so it was actually pretty empty - which I really appreciated. Walking around the camp was eery with so few people around and I feel like I would have gotten frustrated with a ton of tourists there.

'work sets you free'

The memorial site is free to visit and they charge you a couple of Euros to get an Audio guide. If you didn't want the Audio Guide, there is plenty to read and there is an entire building dedicated as a museum. I didn't spend a ton of time in the museum because we walked around the grounds and listened to the audio guide for about 3 hours before we went into the museum. By then we had listened to everything and, to be honest, felt a bit overwhelmed to walk through the museum and get most of the same information as was offered in the audio guide.
--- I don't really know how to end this post. 
All of the tourists visiting the memorial with us were very respectful and overall, I walked around and left with a heavy heart. I pray that something like this doesn't happen again, ever - where one, power-hungry person decided, arbitrarily, to wipe out an entire race and almost succeeded. Disgusting. 
Maybe this post is meant to be without ending. Maybe it is meant to leave you thinking and wondering how this could have ever happened in the first place and praying that it never happens again. Ever.