Katrina's European Escapade

Vienna was INCREDIBLY cold, so the things I saw in the week were a little limited. It gets really hard when there are snow storms after all, and the snow on the ground gets thick and icy...sure its a novelty, but it makes it really hard to see stuff. Actually, the snow changes a lot. It can be the shape of tiny peas, or it can be really large flat flakes, the size of my palm. Anyway, Vienna-

Schloss Schonbrunn, a summer palace that belonged to the Habsburgs, a very famous couple of a duke and his extremely pretty wife, Elizabeth. In the palace, there were several room dedicated to Elizabeth for her preparation for the day...to beautify herself...she was a bit of a weirdo, they served the family a 6 course dinner every night, and mostly she didnt eat anything so she could keep her tiny figure!! She was probably a little sick in the head. There was some beautiful halls in the palace, but the gardens were the most breathtaking.. very precise in the layout of the bushes and just nothing like what we see in Australia. In the gardens they also have the oldest zoo in the world. Some of it was awful, the cages that some of the animals were in were terrible...but otherwise it was a great zoo. They had three species of penguine, including the ones with the yellow feathers coming out of their head and a huge brown fluffy one. The penguines were the only animals that seemed comfortable...evey other animal was inside their home, because of the cold. My favourite animal was the anteater (because Id read about these in Roald Dahls book but never knew if they were real or not!)

Stephansdom was a 13th century gothic cathedral. Honestly, after a while, all the cathedrals seem the same. They are all intensly decorated with stained glass windows and statues of saints and paintings of the Madonna and child. The designer of the cathedral made a statue of himself and put it in the centre of the cathedral, in a stand for the priest...so as to watch over the building. From the tower, I could see most of Vienna and the roof of the cathedral, which is decorated with tiles making up two eagles. There are catacombs here as well (actually there are catacombs all over Europe). These ones stored not only the dukes, but also all of the bones from the people who died in the plague. They were in massive rooms...simply filled with bones. Most of them had a light so we could see inside, but there was one that was pitch black. When a photo was taken and the flash went off it lit up the hundreds of human bones and skulls and honestly it was incredibly frightening.

The neo-gothic rathaus ("rat house") or house for parliament looked like another castel with more beautiful gardens to wonder through. And although I went to the Sigmund Freud museum, it was not very interesting...just spoke about his life. On the other hand I loved the Natural history museum (suprise suprise) which was full of crazy rocks (Mum and Dad- Chris and Mio would have had a ball here because there were simply hundreds of geological rocks). And there were dinosaur bones and other remnants of ancient fish and sea critters.

Enough about Vienna, onto Prague...

The "Sound of Music" tour was a really nice experience. The bus took us to a region called Salzkammergut (I think), which is simply exquisite- massive mountains, sparkling lakes...the only problem was it was sub zero degrees, and the snow in my hair and my wet, freezing feet made it difficult. The snow on the Alps is wonderful and on this day people were disappointed that it was not a clear day, like it is shown in the film. But because the clouds are so low on the mountains and snow is covering the trees there was a mysterious feel about it...you couldnt see mountains entirely. Actually it reminded me of the Musical Phantom of the Opera and other productions where they use CO2 to create the effect of water...it was like that, like the mountains were hiding secrets.

So if you want to know some facts about the film (and many people do not want to know these facts) then keep reading..

Do you all remember the scene where the Von Trapp children and Maria are in a boat on a lake and they fall in. This scene had to be filmed twice and the first time, the littlest girl (Lisle) nearly drowned, because the boat was overturned on top of her.

Lots of the scenes in the film used two sceneries, but made it look as if it was the same place. We visited lots of the scenes used in the film, including the mountain that Maria ran down at the beginning of the film. That mountain is 10km away from the town and the abbey (but it took Maria about 3 minutes to run down to the abbey in the film).

The real von Trapp family (the family the movie is based on) actually did not climb any mountains to escape the Germans, the theatre the children sang in was next door to a train statioin...and they caught a train to Italy, then a ship to the USA, and with very little money started a life there. The mountain they are seen to be climbing over in the film to escape the Nazis actually leads to Germany. This lack of realism is why actually Astrians do not like the film. (In fact I met an Austrian boy on the train who had barely even heard of the film!!)

Probably the cutest thing I learned was about the Eldelweisse. (The song has always been one of my favourites!!) An Eldelweisse is a white flower that only grows on the top of a mountain. Traditionally, Austrain boys would climb to the top of a mountain to pick the flower to give to their girlfriends, to show their love. But many men have been killed trying to climb these mountains, how tragic!!

The other main attraction I visited in Salzburg was the Schloss Helbrun Palace, which I learned quite a bit of history there...basically the different people and states that have ruled Salzburg...next for blogging is Vienna.

Ive now been in Salzburg about three days and most of the time it has been incredibly cold and wet, often raining. Today though, I woke up and it was snowing...quite heavily. It was so nice, but so unbelievably cold that I decided to not to have another day in the city but to sit on a nice warm (free!!) train ...so I travelled up to Linz (where I walked around for a couple of hours), down to Selzthal and back to Salzburg and the snow on the pine trees travelling through the alps was just beautiful. The mountains seem to be endless and they are massive...it often feels like they are going to all come crashing down on you.

On my first day in Salzburg, I walked around the city and just loved the houses and buildings. They all look like life size doll houses, all painted different colours like pink, blue, green, yellow, orange and they have white window frames. I visited Mozarts guesthouse and residence and learned a lot- Mozart was born into a middle class family and they stuggled to get his talent noticed...but his father was a very educated man and realised the genious his son was. So together they travelled the known world. Mozart spent a third of his life travelling. He was one of 6 kids, only 2 of which survived childhood. Mozart loved mostly composing operas.

The sound of music tour was also really interesting...but I dont have any time left, so I have to say see ya later for now...