Around 7 pm on July 4th — or maybe it was later, it’s hard to know for sure, it gets dark quite late in our alpine town — there was a blast of fireworks and firecrackers. It didn’t last long, 15 minutes, maybe 20. Then it was all over and I went back to reading my book. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to seek out other expats, temporary or otherwise, to acknowledge Independence Day, not here in this little town.… continued…
Mike Sowden writes an excellent blog called Fevered Mutterings. He flew down from York, England to visit the temporarily relocated world headquarters of Nerd’s Eye View in Aigen, Austria.
While he was here, we visited the baroque Benedictine library at Admont, wandered the aggressively picturesque streets of Hallstatt, vanquished several servings of epic cake (with one battle nearly lost at the Zauner, a regal bakery in Bad Ischl), climbed a decent number of stairs in Graz, and perused some beautifully crafted local artifacts at Schloss Trautenfels.… continued…
Hallstatt is one of my favorite attractions in Austria. It’s about an hour’s drive from the husband’s home turf. We’ve made a trip there almost every time we’re in Austria and we always take visitors there. It’s shockingly pretty, sometimes it is hard to accept that a place can be real and be so pretty, but it is real indeed.
Humans have occupied this little village on the edge of the lake for thousands of years.… continued…
Overgrown grave marker on the churchyard walls in Fernitz, Austria.… continued…
