What I should have been blogging about for the last 8 weeks, or, A month of travels. PART I: The Motherland, or, Austria.

(duh) The Sound of Music - Rodgers & Hammerstein
The hills are alive with the sound of music
With songs they have sung for a thousand years
The hills fill my heart with the sound of music
My heart wants to sing every song it hears

We began in Austria since mom was still vacationing there after throwing herself a grand birthday-in-Austria bash the month before (which Boo missed to film House). We stepped off the plane to spend the first morning sleepily walking around Salzburg. We visited the house where Mozart was born, and Boo was moved to tears when he saw the tiny wanna-be piano on which Mozart composed his first Symphony at the age of eight. Through the tears, Boo mumbled something about pure envy but then covered his tracks by claiming profound fatigue. To his credit, he supported his claim by managing to fall asleep immediately in the car on the way home; and despite being woken up by my mother every 10 minutes with a command to look at the mountains, he would always promptly fall asleep again.

We had dinner at the local gasthouse (inn + beer garden). Usual fare: beer, cabbage salad, smoked fish with horseradish, dumplings the size of softballs, and kasespeatzle (aka mac n´cheese). We spent the next two days swimming in the cold but drinkably clean lake and bicycling through farms.

Oh those hills? Alive.

Friday, we drove to Vienna to stay with my cousin for a few days. We arrived, peed, and immediately went to the statehouse plaza where the government was showing an enormous projection of an opera. There was also an international food fair in the square. Beer + poppyseed-sugar-gnocchi dessert + opera in the center of town = those austrians know how to have a good time! Afterwards, cousin took us on a nocturnal walking tour of the center. Well done, cousin. Well done.

Saturday we visited a few museums in the Museum Quarter and decided that some modern art just isn´t art. Case in point: Cy Twombly. My barley-there head cold decided to take over that night and so we did not join in on Vienna´s annual citywide pub crawl. It´s called something else but, let´s be serious, what else would you call live bands playing at every single bar on the ring-road in Vienna´s center all night long.

Because we were not stupefyingly hung over the next day, we managed to make it to Schönberg castle before our flight. Schönberg was the Hapsburg´s summer castle. You know, because one castle in Vienna is certainly not enough. The garden there rivals Versailles´. OK maybe it doesn´t rival it, but in the european world of enormous, splendid, luscious-but-dammit-you-will-bend-to-man´s-will gardens, it´s probably second. And the entire garden is free to the public. Unlike Versailles (see upcoming gripe fest).

Schonberg, from like 1/10 of the way into the gardens.

1/4 of the way into the gardens, I could finally fit the entire castle into my frame.

Main fountain in gardens. We were halfway to the end. But it was too far. I was sick!

Then we got on a plane to Venice. But not before my mom managed to park in the diplomat parking only zone.

*Note: I´m back dating this to when I should have posted it.