travel

lucerne

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our time there was brief and not terribly eventful, but it was beautiful and the coffee alone was enough to make me reconsider my whole life plan: find a new job and adopt a new value system that will enable me to justify spending $5,000 on a swiss coffee maker. each time we had coffee, eggboy and i could do nothing more than sit and sip and let our eyes roll to the back of our heads as we tried to find new ways to voice our love for this dark sweet buttery coffee that was thick as soup and finished too soon. 

fondue can wait, order seven more coffees.

let's marry this coffee.

let's have babies with this coffee. 

let's hijack the keystone pipeline, reroute it from lucerne to east grand forks, and then make it carry this coffee.

our love and obsession turned into confusion towards american coffee. how is it possible that thin watery bottomless coffee exists all over the states when even the coffee in the innsbruck train station lobby makes me want to lie on the ground and cuddle with it all day?

i'll shut up now. and then go make a swiss coffee maker fund piggy bank at the paint your own pottery place. 

there's this other thing i want to tell you about! chügelipasteteli. it's my new favorite word. (even though for the longest time we called it chügelipügeli because we kept forgetting the second part of the word.) it's a lucerne specialty that's basically a mountain shaped chicken pot pie with veal and meatballs instead of chickens. it was the thing you want to eat most when it's cold outside and you're dusted with snow. the one that we had was decorated with puff pastry hearts, so yes, i was obsessed from the beginning. 

other goodies we ate in lucerne were eggboy's first döner, a bunch of marzipan, an easter tart, breakfast like there was no tomorrow, and, of course fondue. it was great fondue, smelly fondue. we were touristy about it and had it at a touristy place, but we were, after all, tourists. 

-yeh!

salzburg + hallstatt

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our second honeymoon stop was salzburg, where we engaged in extreme tourism by way of a sound of music tour, fancy wieners in hidden alleys, and mozart kugel! that fancy wiener part sounds dirtier than it is. we really just found this great hidden sausage stand that shakes a bunch of curry on your wiener and people stand in a cronut-sized line for them (so i guess it isn't actually that hidden). 

but let us discuss the cuteness that is salzburg! salzburg is like whoville and disneyland with a large emphasis on cake and chocolate. i loved it so much. and what's even greater is that it's not even really trying that hard to be cute, it is o.g. cute because it's been like that for hundreds and hundreds of years. we went to a restaurant that was 1200 years old and a bakery that was 800 years old. can you even imagine 1200 years ago?! i can't, i just get flashbacks of failing my gregorian chant tests in first-year music history. for the record i did inquire about that bakery's sourdough starter (what is the german word for starter?) but alas their starter is not 800 years old. 

our sound of music tour was everything we dreamed it would be! we frolicked down the path where maria sings "i have confidence" and ate cake in a cafe right next to the church where they got married. eggboy asked if the von trapps really walked across the alps to switzerland, and our tour guide informed us that, no, they just walked 600 meters to the train station. it all suddenly became clear but i'm pretty sure that eggboy would have loved an x-treme sound of music tour requiring a days-long hike through the alps. 

we spent one afternoon in the little lakeside town of hallstatt, about an hour outside of salzburg. we felt like we were in a postcard the entire time. it's so pretty and it has the coolest history. it is home to the oldest salt mine in the world and up until recently, it was only accessible by boat. it kind of reminded me of being on catalina island. a schnitzel-scented catalina island, because of a waterfront schnitzel and sausage stand. not that i'm complaining or anything.

here are some places in salzburg that we loved!

schatz konditorei // this place is hidden in an alley and it might be the cutest bakery of all time. it's the definition of cozy and it sells the cutest colorful cakes. seriously, it is the bakery of my dreams. 

café tomaselli // even though it's pretty young by salzburg standards (only 150 years old!), it's a total institution. i guess mozart drank almond milk there?? if you go, take a peak into the upstairs room, it is so beautiful, i can see why people are regulars. 

cafe-konditorei fürst // ok, yes, we spent about three days in salzburg and this is the third bakery i'm listing, and we went to all of these places multiple times, so do you see why i only packed stretchy pants. but we had to go to this one, it's home to the original mozartkugel!

stiftsbackerei st. peter // this is the 800 year old bakery! it's the bread bakery for the st. peter monastery and it has the fluffiest brioche and the most fantastic smells.

st. peter stiftskeller // the oldest restaurant in the world. it's connected to the same monastery as the stiftsbackerei and we came here for valentine's day. i have to admit, we kept getting distracted trying to envision what it would have looked like 1200 years ago and placing bets on where mozart sat.

hotel goldener hirsch // this place was our cozy oasis in the middle of old town salzburg. it oozes with character and has the most amazing traditional decor. i'm so glad we stayed there. 

restaurant s'herzl // this is one of the restaurants connected to the goldener hirsch, and i had one of my favorite meals of hour whole trip there. goulash with knödel! eggboy got the schnitzel so i tasted some of his, but i don't know, i think goulash was the surprise winner of my heart for this trip.

augustiner bräu // it's a massive beer hall inside a monastery. if i ever decide to become a monk, you'll know where to find me. 

balkan grill // this is the alleyway sausage place i mentioned above. toasty buns, lots of curry, two sausages to a bun. it's so good, it makes me want to shake a bunch of curry onto everything.

bob's tours // this was the tour company we used for the sound of music tour and the hallstatt tour and they were great! we took both tours on a sunday which worked out really well since not a whole lot of businesses are open on sundays. 

gmundner keramik // we didn't buy a whole lot of souvenirs, but we did buy some little dishes from this company, which has been in business since 1492. our hotel had these ceramics everywhere and i loved them so much, so we figured this would be a perfect place to get some little mementos. 

-yeh!

vienna

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i woke up at four this morning with all of the jet-lag! oh man, i am a sleepy sally and it appears that not even any amount of ina garten making eton mess for alex baldwin in the tv will keep me awake right now. 

since four this morning i have drank many espressos, done an enormous amount of laundry, arranged all of eggboy's guidebooks and souvenirs on his desk, bought lots of vegetables to make up for only eating salami and schnitzel and cake and knödel the past two weeks, and placed a new baking soda in the refrigerator because i brought home pinzgau cheese which is so outrageously smelly, it's a good thing our closest neighbors are cats.

above are all of my favorite photos from the first stop on our honeymoon, vienna! our days in vienna began with the doughiest tastiest bread and the creamiest scrambled eggs at our little b&b, which played a continuous soundtrack of waltzes. from there, we went and introduced ourselves to our favorite composer statues, conducted daily cake research, and spent the time with schnitzel that schnitzel deserves. we explored the naschmarkt and the opera hall, and one day on the outskirts of the city, we went bonkers when we came across the apartment that beethoven lived in when he wrote his second symphony. we didn't know how we could top that the next day, but then we ate at a restaurant with a cheese library and a bread sommelier, so there was that! 

the german that i learned in high school came back to me bit by bit and i was able to order a sacher torte and salami pizza on pizza night. every so often we'd see a sign or a plaque from which we could safely assume that, oh, mozart must have walked down this road, or oh, maybe mahler was here. it was really quite magical.

here are some places in vienna that we loved! (thank you sooo much to all of those who sent recommendations!!!)

 

cafe demel // we shared an esterhazy torte in a grand room with a huge chandelier and it felt so fancy. there's a big window to the kitchen so you can watch the bakers decorate all of the cakes. i could have stayed there all day!

trzesniewski // tasty little open faced sandwiches with pickles and eggs and bacon.

mayer am pfarrplatz // a winery on the outskirts of vienna, right where beethoven spent a few summers! i kept stealing bites of eggboy's spätzle, it was so good.

joseph // the most amazing bread. so doughy and chewy and flavorful... it left me speechless.

spiess & spiess // our cute little b & b in a quiet residential part of vienna, with a cute little courtyard and perfect scrambled eggs. 

if dogs run free // we had drinks and became the most hipster versions of ourselves.

steirereck // it's a restaurant in a park with a cheese library, a bread sommelier, a chocolate course, and an indoor herb garden. it was like eating at a tasty museum! i loved it so much. (thanks, pops!! :)

figlmüller // where schnitzel dreams come true.

-yeh!