Burg Lichtenstein

http://www.burgliechtenstein.eu/de/anfahrt.html

Seegrotte Hinterbrühl

http://www.seegrotte.at/002_englisch/frameset.htm

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First, the quality of Zotter chocolate makes you wonder what the hell this Godiva crap is all about. Godiva?!?! Ha! Go-diva off a cliff. Zotter chocolate has a texture to it that makes you swoon. So smooth. And a flavor that is so powerful. You just place it on your tongue and let it melt. Heaven!

Second, Zotter only deals with organic and fair trade chocolate. Also, the company tries to be as local as possible. When Zotter can buy ingredients from Austria, it will.

Third, Zotter comes up with the craziest flavors. Raspberry coconut chocolate is divine. Olive oil and lemon chocolate is, no joke, surprisingly good. Beer chocolate was not okay. When I tried it, my eyes started to water with the cruelty of the nasty flavor and though I desperately looked for a way to spit out the offensive taste, I had no chance. Oh well, there is a price to pay sometimes for being adventurous.

Now to my great joy and amazement, I discovered two weeks ago that you can take a tour of the Zotter Chocolate Factory in Styria, Austria. It’s a 1.5 hour drive away from Vienna. For the price of €10 you take a tour and try, taste, drink, and eat chocolate until you think you’re going to die.

The tour starts with a video. Then you go through the entire factory with an audio guide. I have to admit, I only listened to my audio guide for about seven minutes. The entire time I was distracted by the heady smell of chocolate and could only think, bring on the chocolate! And boy did they ever.

It was one chocolate fountain after the other. From white chocolate to milk, to semi-sweet, to dark. A single room with 15 different chocolate fountains. Then you go through a long hallway with every chocolate flavor that Zotter offers. Rose chocolate. Nut chocolate. Mint chocolate. Whatever. You try all of them.

Then you go to the drink chocolate. They call it Flying Chocolate because the chocolate is on a little conveyer belt that goes by and you pick your chocolate, drop it in hot milk, and enjoy.

But wait, there’s more! Then there is the chocolate covered fruit. But wait, there’s more! Then you go to the mixed flavors. Like the raspberry coconut chocolate. Or beer chocolate. It was to the point where my group of friends and I groaned in delicious agony because we just couldn’t see straight anymore. We just couldn’t taste any more chocolate.

Of course at the end of the tour there was a gift shop. We bought like crazy.

Overall the experience was amazing. I encourage any chocolate lover to go for a visit.

Zotter Chocolate

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All these photos are parts of Vienna. I love the incredible variety of this city. Hiker, wine lover, water-sport enthusiast, culture hungry, Vienna has it all.

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At least living in a desirable location tempts friends and family to come visit. My parents, brother and his wife, and almost all of my friends have come to visit me. Despite living here, I always struggle to put a daily sightseeing tour together for my guests. Finally I just put it down on paper, and whip it out whenever people show up. I include days of the week because some places in the city are better during the week or weekend. I also group sights together according to location to avoid zigzagging through the city.

Weekday – Tour of the Inner City. Start at Karlsplatz and walk down Kartnerstraße. Remind your guests to look up to see the beautiful architecture. Enter Stephansdom and tell your guests to make a round of the cathedral. Then tell them to go to the top to get a good view of the city. Walk Am Graben and explain the statue in the middle is a tribute to surviving the black plague. Check out the pretty Peter’s Church. Tell them about the underground bathrooms Am Graben and encourage them to take a look. Walk your guests to Café Central for a break. Then head on over to the Hofburg and encourage them to take a tour. Grab a streetcar that circles the Ring and explain all the buildings. At Schwedenplatz get out and take the U1 to Donauinsel. Let your guests see the mighty Danube. On the way back, get out at Praterstern and have your guests ride the Riesenrad. Jump back in the U1 to exit Karlsplatz again and eat anywhere in the Inner City (example: Palmenhaus) so your guests can see the Inner City at night.

Saturday – go to Naschmarkt to see the Fleamarket as well as the food market. Go to Schönbrunn and encourage your guests to take a tour and walk the gardens. Take a break either at the Gloriette or Dommayer café. Go to the Technical Museum if you have male guests, they seem to like that kind of thing. If you have female guests, go to Mariahilferstraße to go shopping, they seem to like that kind of thing.  Go to dinner at a Heurigen. Apologize to your guests when they have digestive problems from all the greasy food. Or just tell them to drink more to burn the fat away.

Sunday – Choose either the performance of the Spanish Riding School, see my post about that here, or the Vienna Boys Choir. Go to Kunsthistorische Museum and encourage your guests to take a tour. The guides are awesome. If the weather is nice, choose a pretty garden to walk through and sit comfortable in a coffeehouse.

I think that sums Vienna up, unless you have other suggestions.

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Frankfurt – the people are most definitely friendlier. The women are more fashionably dressed (a much needed break for my poor abused eyes in Vienna). The city is cleaner. Sightseeing in Frankfurt is minimal. Having spent a day in the city, I saw all that I needed to see.

Vienna – poor Frankfurt can’t compete with the glory of Vienna’s Inner City. Vienna is stunningly beautiful. Frankfurt is functional. Also the sightseeing possibilities in Vienna fill four full days easily due to the wonderful options of palace tours, museums of every kind, coffeehouses, gardens and so on.

To sum up really quickly the difference between Vienna and Frankfurt: Throw a stone in Frankfurt and you’ll hit a bank. Throw a stone in Vienna and you’ll hit a church or a palace.

My conclusion: Skip Frankfurt and just use the airport to get on your next plane to Vienna.

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The Lipizzaner are horses that are born dark brown/black and turn complete white over the course of their first ten years of life. They are beautiful creatures that are paired with the best horse riders in the world to show off the strength and perfection of both the horse and the rider. It really is breath-taking when a rider without stirrups convinces a white stallion to rear up on its hind legs and jump two feet off of the ground. The horse and rider also perform difficult steps, jumps, and other moves to classical music from Mozart.

The only problem is that the show was set up with too much detail. It was a gruelling hour and a half. After 45 minutes, the audience was sighing, shifting in their seats, and having a hard time paying attention. Don’t get me wrong, when the horses and their riders did something stunning, the audience broke out in appreciative applause as one should at such a display of perfection. But the show needs to be cut shorter. An hour and a half is just too long. 45 minutes would have been fine. Appreciation turns to boredom and an audience member like me comes away from the experience thinking, well that was just too bad.

So here’s a shout out to the people that organize the Spanish Riding School’s show. Cut it shorter, let the horse and rider show off their gasp-inducing stunts, and let the audience go to a coffeehouse while they are still babbling with excitement about the Lipizzaner and their riders.

Rider and Horse jumping

Part of the show

Mom and Baby

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There were many things I didn’t know about the Schweitzerhaus. First off, it is located in the garish Wiener Prater. I simple don’t know why people are so wild about the Prater. It is a never ending carnival amusement park of hell. Loud music blaring from every ride and mixing together in a shrieking mass of noise. Neon lights flashing. Rides looming over you with a feel of desperation cloaking them. I haven’t been to the Prater in almost three years, and yesterday, I sure remembered why.

It seems that the Schweitzerhaus fits right in with the Prater. What a scummy dive. When I arrived at my table, it was sticky with sloshed over beer from the occupants before me. My chair was crammed right up against the person sitting behind me, so I had to hunch over in my seat so as not to bump heads with her. And of course with my luck, the people a table over were heavy smokers. I had a constant halo of cigarette smoke floating around my head for the duration of my stay.

The food was mediocre, the service rough and drunk, and the noise level of intoxicated people yelling at each other unbearable. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

So here’s a tip. If anyone ever mentions the Schweitzerhaus, slap ‘em upside the head.

I for one need to settle my nerves after last night’s experience. You’ll be seeing me at Hotel Imperial’s restaurant, Which is my secret little get-away, sipping a cappuccino in the air-conditioned, cool, and quiet coffeehouse of elegance.

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Since everything is closed on Sunday, except for eating establishments and museums, going out to enjoy the green parts of Vienna is ideal. Yesterday my husband and I went for a walk at the Lainzer Tiergarten.

Lainzer Tiergarten means zoo, but there are no cages here. The animals that are natural and wild to the Vienna woods are free to roam here in the over 6 acres of land that is reserved for the Lainzer Tiergarten. Can you image! In a major city over 6 acres of land is reserved for wild life and nature. It’s really incredible.

The clean, easy paths that you can follow really take you deep into the woods. You see only forest, creeks, and the wild chirping of all kinds of birds and crickets. It was perfect for a city girl like me. God knows that I do not own a pair of tennis shoes, let alone hiking boots. My little ballerinas were just fine for this walk. I got to enjoy nature while still keeping my shoes clean! Now that’s practical.

Different paths take you different places, but the one we took was a little over an hour walk in one direction to get to a restaurant. There we could rest ourselves, have a snack and a drink, and then continue back to where we came from.

This was a really relaxing Sunday for us. We got out of the apartment, drove for 10 minutes to get out into the wild nature. It was hard to believe that we were technically still in a city. I would definitely recommend the Lainzer Tiergarten for a wonderful Sunday stroll. If you are interested, they offer a number of tours as well.

Map of Lainzer Tiergarten

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What’s really great is the city has what is called CityBike Wien It’s a program with over 25 bike stations throughout the entire city which allows you to rent a bike at a very low cost. All you do is find a station on the very easy-to-navigate website. Go to the station (usually near an U-Bahn), register at the station, pay using credit card or ATM card, pop the bike out of its docking station, and you are on your way.

The bike condition isn’t bad at all. I thought they were going to be beat up and abused, but both my bike and Paul’s were fine. We started out in the 12th district, which is more on the outskirts of the city, and rode the bikes into the Inner City.

Finally we have something else to do on a boring Sunday other than just go to a coffeehouse.

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http://www.stiftmelk.at/englisch/index.html 

We took the tour and it was pretty crummy. I would have had much more fun, and had probably gotten more information, going through the museum and the rest of the monastery myself.

We went into the town of Melk for an early dinner. We found one nice restaurant after another and since it is a pretty sleepy town, no reservations needed.

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