The hills are alive...

From Vienna we caught the slow train to Salzburg.  If you are in this region of Europe (including Germany) and traveling by train, check out the regional trains which take twice as long to get somewhere but are less than a sixth of the price.  Again our hostel didn't have a kitchen so it was cold sandwiches for dinner. On our way back to the hostel there was a small court with several tents set up and from one of them we bought 2 thai spring rolls for a warm snack.

In the morning we had free breakfast at the hostel (score!) waiting for the rain and cold to let up.  Eventually we headed out to see a little bit of the city, walking through bio-fest (a festival in the center market area), an amazing cemetery, Mozart's birth house, and a famous street which in my notes is called "G-something."  For lunch we switched hostels and our second hostel had a kitchen which meant soup with bread!

The neat cemetery and G street

In the afternoon the sun peeked through a little bit and we headed up the non-castle hill (there are two hills in Salzburg, one has a castle and one doesn't).  The views were amazing.  We hiked 2 km to another lookout and the mountain started getting misty and cold and the path was a dead end and had to hike back out the way we came.

 Mozart's birth house

Musical instruments made from bread 

Dinner was an amazing chili we made in the hostel (amazing because it wasn't pasta and red sauce).  We chatted with some Canadians and Aussies over dinner and then went to bed.

In the morning we caught the train to Munich.

The drinking water on the non-castle hill

Please excuse this post if something doesn't make sense.  It was written while exhausted from a 36 hour transit from Helsinki to New Zealand.

Graz and Vienna

After being dropped off at the train station in Sezana, Slovenia, we took a train all day to arrive in Graz, Austria.  There were two reasons for stopping here.  One: it was too long to go all the way to Vienna in one go from Sezana.  Two: Graz's historic center is an UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Since the hostel in Graz didn't have a kitchen, and the restaurant that was suggested to us had a menu only in German, we picked up sandwich stuff for dinner from the grocery store.  But better than paying three times the price for mystery meals at the restaurant.

In the morning we headed straight to downtown historic Graz.  One of the sights to see, according to Wikitravel, was the glockenspiel, which went off at 11am and 5pm.  We waited around for 10 minutes to see the clock go off at 11 and it was very disappointing.  Wikitravel made it seem more interesting.

See that figure of a man and women?  They just spin around while the bells are chiming. I don't really know what more I expected though.

In the middle of town is a hill where part of a fort still stands.  It had cool views of the city, and an enormous clock tower. And that is all there is to see in Graz.  We headed back to the hostel to catch the 3:30 train to Vienna.  The train ride was incredibly scenic and part of it is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Thankfully our hostel in Vienna had a kitchen (we were really sick of cold sandwiches) so we made pasta with gorgonzola tomato sauce and red pepper. If you see Barilla's gorgonzola tomato sauce in the grocery store, seriously try it. Amazing.

In the morning we walked around downtown Vienna.  There is a giant old church that dominates the downtown square and is free to enter (yay for free stuff).  We walked around Hofburg palace and it's surrounding gardens, which wasn't very impressive, presumably because it's in a city.

The most impressive part of Hofburg palace

For lunch we headed back to the hostel to make stir fry vegetable sandwiches with tuna fish.  In the afternoon we walked to a cute church just around the corner from our hostel and people watched in the park in front of it.

Dinner was again pasta and vegetables but for dessert we decided to splurge and bought a box of three mini frozen chocolate cakes that are heated in the microwave and drizzled with chocolate sauce. Excellent.