Salzburg

March 24-26: living the music! We saw lovely, quaint Salzburg in springtime-a dream! haha, Even though it hardly stopped snowing once while we were there, Salzburg was awesome! We both read Maria Trapp's book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, before we got to Salzburg, so we were prepared to see both the REAL Trapp family sites as well as The Sound of Music sites. Both "flavors" of Salzburg were equally exciting! The cold temperatures and constant snowfall prevented us from see everything on our long list, but the snow did provide Jeff with plenty of ammo to pelt Shaina with snowballs.



Right here I had a in the picture of Nonnberg Abbey, where the real life Maria was first planning to be a nun and later where she married Captain von Trapp, but the dumb blog deleted it. so, imagine a catholic church, and it looked like that! In the movie, the nuns sing "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" at Nonnberg, but the wedding is in a bigger church.


The back of Schloss Hellbrunn, which they used for the back of the Trapps' house in the movie. Can you spot Shaina on the steps? The real Trapp home is in Aigen, a nearby suburb of Salzburg. We couldn't make it out there because we didn't quite know where the house was in the town!



Dancing at Rolf and Liesel's Gazebo . The Gazebo was given to Salzburg after The Sound of Music was finished, and they reconstructed it in a different part of Hellbrunn's park/yard. (that's why that yellow wall behind it isn't in the movie). Oh, one other detail: the real Trapp children had completely different names than the movie kids! Two of them were Rupert and Hedwig... we decided that we like the movie names better. So there was never a Liesel in real life. But we can pretend!!!



Re-enacting the Rolf-Liesel kiss by the Gazebo.



Jeff's snowman and "snow sumo" on a balcony wall at Hohensalzburg Fortress. We organized our visit around 2 things: the Sound of Music sights and the list of "Salzburg's must-sees," according to Maria's autobiography, and the fortress was on the list in that book. It's also in the background in part of the movie.



Shaina's snow horse...he's laying down. Can you tell where his legs are? It's very hard to sculpt a horse out of snow. This is the only white horse in Austria that we got a picture of, because there were no pictures allowed of the Lippizans in Vienna!



There was a mini Salzburg marrionette museum inside the fortress. Jeff liked playing with the sample on display. They are hard to manouver, those puppets! Too bad there were no puppet shows playing while we were in Salzburg. The arrionettes are so detailed and life-like, and the theater is world famous!



A view of Leopoldskron Castle, the house they used for the front of the Trapp home in the movie. This picture is taken from the top of the Fortress's tower, with all 12x zoom that our camera has to offer. It got dark before we could actually visit this house.



Fa, a long long way to run!!!!! This is that same canopy that they run through in the movie singing Do Re Mi. (it's in the Mirabell Gardens) The snow sort of changes its appearance, doesn't it? That didn't stop Shaina from becoming Julie Andrews for a quick run through!



The Pegasus fountain in Mirabell Gardens. In the movie, they run around it while singing Do Re Mi. The snow looked too slippery to act out that scene!




Shaina by the Residenz Fountain-the one that Julie Andrews splashes, while siinging I Have Confidence, in the movie.



Jeff chucking a snowball left handed at Shaina on the way up to Hohensalzburg Fortress. Why left handed? Since Shaina was only wearing thin gloves, Jeff gave her his right glove so she could fight back. How...... gallant!

We in Wien

March 20th-23rd: Vienna is such a beautiful, cultured, historical city! The weather was very incooperative, with snow and cold and wind at random intervals, but we saw enough of the city to make us fall in love with it. Highlights were the Lippizan horses and Schloss Schonbrunn, (a beautiful Hapsburg palace), the clock museum, and Apfelstrudel, (which is Austrian apple pie).


The front of the Hofburg complex, which includes the Spanish Riding School and the beautiful Lippizan horses.


Shaina's favorite kind of clock in the clock museum: can you see the clock?


Can you see shaina in this clock's mirror? zoom in, that's her face!


The lovely concert hall where we saw a Mozart and Strauss highlights concert. After seeing the ballet couple dance here, Jeff tried out some of the lifts on his wife later... they are actually quite painful when you don't know whaat you're doing!


Shaina in front of the Neue Berg building


Us behind the Schloss Schonbrunn...the first and last time we saw the blue sky and sun in Vienna!

Prog Blogue...no, wait...Prague Blog

March 15-18: We flew from Athens to Munich (2hrs) and then took a 7 hour train trip to Praha, switchin trains every hour or so. If Jeff wasn't so good at finding his way around train stations, we would have been either lost or very very late for our trains! The train that took us across the German border had only 1 car, so it was more like a bus on tracks! The hostel was rather odd, with bedspreads that were too short for our long legs, and no sheets! The only way to bear it was to not think, just sleep! We really enjoyed church at the mission branch on Sunday. Jeff joyfully saved a set of Czech crown coins for his fast growing coin collection. Oddly enough, we found a few great Chinese food places in Prague, and ate Chinese every night! Don't worry, we still tried Czech sausage too!


The lovely buildings near Prague Castle


The crowded graves in the old old Jewish Cemetary


Jeff completing his "pilgramige" to Tych Brahe's house


The changing of the guard in the whirlwind snow at Prague Castle. It was sunny right before this, and it got sunny 15 minutes later! Those patchy snow storms plagued our freezing fingers all day!


The cathedral in Prague Castle, right after the 15 minute snow storm... nice, innocent blue sky, huh?

"Ruined!"

Outside of Athens and the Parthenon, we visited 3 other ancient Greek ruins: Delphi, Mycenae, and Corinth. We found that the natural beauty blended quite well with the fallen temples and big rocks. Shaina again adored the many different kinds of wild flowers, (although she resisted posting the plethora of pictures she took of all the flower varieties), and Jeff, as usual, enjoyed exploring dark cave-like rooms underground and taking artistically balanced pictures.

Ancient Delphi:
Saturday, March 9th, we stopped at Ancient Delphi on our way to Konitsa in Greece. It was such a warm, beautiful day, and we loved the beautiful scenery. We made a bathroom dash right when we got to Delphi, and when we came back, they were just barely swinging the gate closed! We missed seeing the actual town ruins by a few minutes, but luckily there were still quite a few things to see without the admission ticket. Have you ever seen such a blue sky????

Shaina loves big, rocky mountains!


In the ancient gymnasium of Delphi-I wouldn't want to lose a ball off that cliff!


Jeff in the Delphi ruins


Us by the reconstructed remains of Athena's temple at Delphi. That is one bright, warm sun!!!


Ancient Mikines-better known as Mycenae:
Wednesday, March 12th, we went to the lovely, windswept hilltop of Ancient Mycenae. The wind made the clouds move super fast-one second it was sunny and the next it was cloudy. That sure made picture-taking interesting!

Up on top of Mycenae


At the entrance of Mycenae.


Mmmmm, the place was covered in these yellow flowers!


More Mycenae ruins


Mycenae's outer wall... see the purple fleurs on it?


Ancient Corinth (Korinthos) and Acrocorinth (Akrokorinthos):
Friday, March 14, we went to see ancient Corinth and Acrocorinth, the huge fortress ruins on a tall hill behind Corinth. We were utterly pooped from the previous day, when we hiked the Lousios Gorge, so our wanderings in Corinth were rather slow and sleepy. Our lethargy did not diminish the beauty of the flowers or the great views from Acrocorinth, though!

The walls of Acrocorinth


Shaina walking in Acrocorinth-it got really warm up there!


The view of Acrocorinth from its highest point. That's the Bay of Corinth in the distance!


Jeff in an underground room in Acrocorinth


A "Jeff special" picture of the temple of Apollo

GORGE-ous!

A walk on the wild side... We hiked in 2 gorges in Greece: the Vikos Gorge up north near the Albanian border on Monday the 10th, and the Lousios Gorge down south in the warm Peloponesse on Thursday the 13th. The wildflowers, the rugged, breathtaking views, and leaping down hills were Shaina's favorite parts. Jeff liked the lizards, climbing big rocks in the middle of rivers, and exploring off the beaten trail.

LOUSIOS GORGE!!



VIKOS GORGE!

The Classics

March 4-7: The longest leg of our trip included: a 4 hr train from Rome to the shore in Ancona, 10 minute bus to the port, 22 hr ferry (5pm-3pm the next day), and then a 4 hr train ride to Athens and finally a 15 minute walk to our hostel (we named our heavy orange backpacks Fred and George after the Weasly twins in Harry Potter, in hopes of making their 40-lbs seem more funny than painful).

An interesting thing about Greece is they use a different alphabet than us, and the transcriptions into our alphabet have no consistent spellings, so the road names on our GPS map were quite different than those in our guidebook, which were in turn different from the actual names written on the road signs. That problem only came up later, though, because when we first got to Athens around 9pm, tired from that all night boat ride with no bed, (in our 36th straight hour of travel time since we left Rome), the signs were ONLY written in the Greek alphabet, and our GPS device ran out of battery power. Exercizing great inginuity, along with some pretty sweet guesswork, however, we found our little negative 5-star hostel and collapsed into a very firm bed. Victory!!!!


In front of the temple of a greek god whose name starts with an H...forget the whole name right now! 2. At the 2500 year old cemetary of Kerameikos, we counted 15 turtles! How many do you see in this picture??


1. On top of a big rock with the ancient acropolis behind us. 2. Jeff in the Kerameikos cemetary... peek-a-boo!


1. Us in front of the Parthenon... we were a tad sad to see all that scaffolding in the way of truly great pictures, but history must be preserved some way, I guess! 2. These are some daisies behind the Acropolis-nice artistic picture!