Winter wonderland

Apologies for the delayed post...Here's the past few weeks

 shout out to Forrest Howell for filling me in on this spectacular building/exhibit.  It's called the Flederhaus.  It is basically a house of hammock.  The only problem is that when we went there, all the hammocks had been taken down :(

 Catacombs in St. Stephansdom

 at the end of the tour our guide let us follow him back through the tour backwards as he turned off all the lights... creepy

 We then went to Melk and saw this monastery

 with a solid library

 we then rented bikes and rode 20+km along the danube to Krems.  Aside from being a little saddle sore it was delightful!

 We stopped at Prater and rode the swings overlooking the city

 This is the Musikverein... one of my favorite places in the entire world.  This picture also represents how I had a lesson with Benedikt Dinkhauser who played in the Vienna Philharmonic... so legit!!!

 Shout out to Mr. Felt and my 10th grade history class... This is the car that Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in which started WWI.  All because his driver needed to turn around and made a three point turn creating a "Y" instead of the superior "U" turn (he was an avid U fan)

 Spot the bullet hole

 This is the REAL captain von Trapp's uniform

 hipster pictures from our bike ride

 we also rented paddle boats

 we checked out the University of Vienna...it happened to be the first day of school the day we went

 Standing room at the Staatsoper... tail wag

 Schonbrunn Palace

 Belvedere

 Konzerthaus...seing the Wiener Symphoniker

 We spent this last weekend in Hallstatt... it is arguably the most beautiful place in Europe

 it was a wee bit chilly and rainy and freezing!

 spot the Asians in the background... apparently people from Asia love Hallstatt

 There's a big salt mine at the top of the hill that we visited

 There are wooden slides that the miners used to get around... hence the leather reinforcement on the rear

 gotta love cable cars

 Accio horcrux!  This was the spitting image of the lake where Voldemort hid one of his horcruxes... in the salt mine

 these skulls were the other attraction... I'm not a huge fan of human skulls

 This is where we stayed... most beautiful view over the lake

 except for the creepy clown in our room it was great

 we are excited for snow and skiing in the Alps

 We took a bus over to the town across the lake to go see some ice caves... unfortunately there was too much snow so it was too dangerous to go in but we went to some other caves called mammoth caves.  There was a dancing group from Switzerland in our tour... they were quite friendly in their short lederhosen

 they got 20 cm of new snow that morning!!!! 

 Hallstatt was gorgeous... it was super fun to get my first taste of snow of the season and in the ALPS! I'm still thawing and drying out but it was worth the cold. 

The slides in the Salt mine were the bomb!