The hills are alive in Austria!!

Oh Austria! Food, fun and f-ing cold weather.

We started off our trip to Austria in Vienna. Big and beautiful, there are enough museums and palaces to keep you busy for weeks. On our first day we stumbled upon an exhibit at a local museum about King Tut and the Pharoahs of Egypt. Luckily they had some English signs and we got an audio guide, so not all was lost. We wandered through some of the city, but the almost single digit weather did not make for fun times. We did find some gems within the city. I visited the Belvedere museum, the former home of a prince, which houses the original Klimt painting, the Kiss. It was beautiful, with real gold leaf within it, it sparkled from behind it's case. Mat found a museum on military history with the original car and uniform (complete with blood stains) of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand I, whose assassination sparked the first world war.

After three cold and rainy days in Vienna we headed to Salzburg, the home of Mozart, with it´s distant snow capped mountains, abundance of Mozart paraphanalia and sights from the Sound of Music. Since Mat has never watched the movie, we visited a Marionette theatre, which performed a shortened version with marrionettes. Unique to say the least. A visit to the fortress gave us a great view of the city and some history, while the Sound of Music Bus Tour we signed up for took us into the lesser known parts of Salzburg and the beautiful countryside to show us where the movie was filmed and where the real Von Trapp family lived. Even with the singing of songs from the movie, it was still a great tour and showed how gorgeous of a country Austria really is.

Next stop: Munich, Germany for the World Famous Beer festival known as Oktoberfest!!