Post 3: Return to Austria, wandering and wining

After a 5 hour bus ride and a 30 minute train ride we arrived in Baden, we went on a quick grocery run and then out to a Heurige near my house.  There are a lot of Heurigen around here, and if you know where to find the calendars online you can go to one every day and enjoy local food and wine- so we took full advantage of this!  They're also rather inexpensive, at most of them for a meal and a few glasses of wine you can pay 10 Euro or less per person.  The one we went to on the first night had a good selection of food and some great new wines that we tried out, but it was really smoky!

The next day (December 30) we went on a walk/hike that went through the pedestrian zone at the city center, up into the Kurpark to check out Bellevue, around the hillside behind Baden to the Ruine Rauhenstein and then back to my apartment.  It was a long way- but we saw a lot of my favorite places around Baden and the weather was beautiful.

A picture I snapped on the hike up to Ruine Rauhenstein- Mom said she's going to use it as an Easter card since it looks sort of religious.

 After lunch and some treats from the bakery we rested and read at home until we decided to go out, see the town at night, and have dinner at a Greek restaurant.  The food was decent if a bit over salted, and there was a lot of it, but drinks were expensive and we needed them!  When we came back we watched The Holiday, which is one of the movies we always watch around the holidays.  Others on our list are Bad Santa, The Grinch, and Love Actually (of course!).

On the 31 we did another round of grocery shopping (including a stop at the Vinothek), since Sunday was a holiday all the shops were very busy!  After we put everything away at home we caught a bus down to Bad Vöslau so I could show my parents one of my schools, and then walk back through the vineyards.  We had another great sunny day!

Dad, Connie and I chilling with the manatees in Bad Vöslau

 It was another long walk, but at least it included stopping for lunch at a Heurige in Sooß!  This particular Heurige also has a lot of art done by local artists on display, no smoking, and they were playing some good music- not from the 80s!  It was a great atmosphere, and I can imagine sitting there for hours drinking wine and snacking, but the sun goes down early and we still had a few miles to walk to get back to my place.  

Our lunch at the Heurige in Sooß.

When we got back we rested and read for awhile, and then mom got restless, so we ended up playing a few rounds of UNO while having a light snack for our dinner and drinking a bottle of wine.  Some of our family friends gave me a UNO travel pack before I left, and this was the first time I'd opened it- those cards are tiny, so small that I couldn't stop laughing at them (of course it's not so funny when you've got so many tiny cards that your hand cramps up).

A little after 10pm we headed out to the Kurpark to see the fireworks.  We had been hearing fireworks since about 5, and mom kept asking when the fireworks started, but as it turns out, the city doesn't organize the fireworks like they do for the 4th of July in the US.  Instead everyone goes out and buys a car load of fireworks, and then sets them off from the time it gets dark (4:30/5 ish) until about 2 in the morning.  I seriously think that for every person in Austria (about 8 million) there were at least 2-3 fireworks set off.  Anyway, to get into the higher areas of the park we had to go in a side entrance since the main area of the park was all fenced in to keep the drunk kids with firecrackers from getting up into the rest of the park.  We sat up there for about an hour watching fireworks go up in Baden and in all the towns south/southeast from there.  There were a lot of really large beautiful fireworks both near and far away, not just the small usual personal fireworks (of course they had those too, but you just heard them, they didn't rise above the buildings).  At about 11:45 the park started filling up, our view was totally blocked, and I was freezing, so we decided to walk back home on back streets.  It was like walking through a war zone (or at least what I imagine walking through a war zone would be like).  There were fireworks every where- totally surrounding us, exploding overhead, being fired off across the street, and the firecrackers... they had HUGE firecrackers, and they set them off in the tunnels and under bridges to amplify the sound.  It was crazy, and once it hit 12 it was like being in a bag of popping popcorn.  I know I've never seen that many fireworks in one night!

The first morning of the new year was wet and foggy- in other words, typical.  We decided to walk through the vineyards north of Baden to Gumpoldskirchen for lunch at a Heurige there.  The trail was pretty much just a mud track with all the dampness, and all along the way we found evidence of fireworks from the night before.  With all the fog the scenery was very dreamlike- or Irish because of the damp (if they made wine there that is).  The Heurige we went to was more like a restaurant than the one's I'm used to (most of their food was hot, and you ordered it at the table instead of the counter).  It was also a little more expensive than other Heurigen, but the food was good and so was the wine!  I also ordered a dessert there of Burbon Vanilla ice cream with a rum cherry sauce- soooo delicious!

Our foggy walk through the vineyards to Gumpoldskirchen

After (just barely) catching the train back to Baden we started our UNO tournament with our own rules and scoring- it took us a few days to finish! Some stats: I never went under 100 points (after the first game), I also had the biggest drop in points (-170 some), and I won!  Dad never had a positive number, mom went back and forth between negative and positive, but ended in the positive, and our longest game lasted more than an hour (I have no idea how...).  When we got sick of UNO we watched Ratatouille and drank some more wine.

On the 2 we went grocery shopping again, and of course stopped at the bakery and the Vinothek again.  We were going to take a bus down to Berndorf for a hike, and then go into Vienna, but it was really foggy again and we had a pretty late start, so we just went into Vienna.  We missed the fast train, so we ended up taking the incredibly slow train into the city.  One of our family friends lived in Vienna when she was little, and she gave us her old address so we could go check it out and take some pictures for her, so that was our first order of business.  It's on the north side of town (but still on the west side of the Donau- or Danube in English), so it took awhile to get out there and back again- but it was worth it.  The house is big, and totally covered in vines, they also have a huge backyard, which is pretty special for Vienna.

Dad standing outside the house our friend Ann lived in when she was little in Vienna

 After seeing Ann's old house we went to the Naschmarkt- which is where I always seem to end up when I go into Vienna.  We were pretty hungry so we went to Dr. Falafel's for a great falafel sandwich (which is normally vegan, but we had ours with sheep's cheese).  Mom and dad both shopped for scarves, we found several manly scarves, but dad wouldn't buy any of them (despite saying earlier in the trip that he wanted one), mom found a few, and I (surprisingly) didn't buy any!  That's the first time I've been there and not bought a scarf!  Once we were done shopping we were cold, and wanted to go out for coffee and cake, since that's a very Austrian thing to do in the mid/late afternoon.  However, I don't really know the coffee houses of Vienna all that well, especially around the Naschmarkt, so we came back to Baden to check out a cafe here.  It wasn't cheap, but we had some good coffee, and tasty treats; dad had carrot cake (not as big as mom's), I had something like a cannoli- but filled with a nougat/chocolate pastry cream sort of thing, and mom had what's called a Marzipan Kartoffel (Marzipan potato)- don't worry there's not really anything potato about it besides the looks.  Then we went home to continue our UNO tournament, drink more wine and have dinner.

As it turns out, it's a good thing we didn't go to Berndorf on the 2, because the weather on the 3 was warm (alright, 40s) and sunny!  It's almost never sunny in Berndorf, so it was certainly a freak weather day, but that made it a great day for showing my parents my other school, the little town that Arthur Krupp built with his silverware factory, and hiking up to the Guglzipf.  All along the path up to the look out tower that is the Guglzipf there were signs to teach us about the nature surrounding us.  The signs were all written in the old German script, with some old German words as well, so that made them a bit hard for me to read and translate, but they were still pretty and informative.

Mom enjoying the sun on our day in Berndorf

 Once we got up to the top of the hill we still had to climb up the tower, and once we were at the top the view was amazing.  We could see the whole Triesting valley, and all the hills surrounding, as well as the flat lands east of Berndorf.  We saw Bad Vöslau, and we could just barely see a mountain in the distance behind the hills of the Wienerwald.  We had a picnic lunch up on the hilltop, and then dad decided we should just take the road down instead of one of the trails.  Little did we know the road would take us to the southern end of the valley, two towns beyond Berndorf!  It was still a nice walk back, through some countryside I may not have seen otherwise.  

A view of Berndorf from the Guglzipf.

We got back just in time to catch the "fast" bus, which was driven by the slowest bus driver ever, back to Baden.  We stopped at the bakery for a few treats for our last night, and then back to my place to see which Heurigen were open that night.  We ended up going to a Heurige just across the river from my apartment, they of course had more good local homemade food, and good wines for a great price.  It was a great last night with my parents!


The next morning (Wednesday) we got up really early and went to the airport together to say goodbye.  It was so good to have them visit, we really crammed a lot in to 2 weeks, and I loved showing them around my area.  While the holidays were really different this year, without all of our usual neighborhood get togethers with our group of family friends (that are more like extended family than just friends), they were still great and I'm glad my parents could be here!


In other news- I'm moving out of my apartment tomorrow!!! I think the only thing I'll miss about this place is that it's only a 10 minute walk to the train station, and a 15 minute walk from the shops.  I'm looking forward to my new place with a cool flatmate (Liz), and a working wash machine (hell, a working everything).


Happy 2012 everyone! Stay in trouble and keep on adventuring- even if it's not in a foreign land.