The hills are alive, with the sound of music...

..or they were yesterday as I serenaded Elwira on our walk up through the wine region to the top of the mountain on our way to Kahlenberg.

I have just spent three and a half great days in Vienna, with my friend Elwira as my personal tour guide. When I arrived on Sunday she immediately took me to my apt. (actually her friends empty apt.) which she arranged for me to have to myself for the week. It was such a pleasant surprise to have a place to myself and it was such as welcomed relief from communal, hostel living. In the three days I have been to the oldest brewery in Vienna (Salm Braeu), visited the Summer palace (Schönbrunn) and winter palace (Hofburg) of the Hapsburg's, seen the bodies of dead Austrians that were buried under Stephendom Cathedral in the main square during the plagues in the 17th C, and enjoyed a mini tour of the wine region in Vienna.

The wine region tour was called Heurigen Express. During this tour we took a hop on, hop off choo choo train from Grinzing up the mountain a little where we decided to hop off and walk to the top. Well, after 5 minutes Elwira was struggling (not me of course..hehe) and to lessen the physical stress I started my rendition of the Sound of Music Soundtrack. For those of you who know and love the movie as much as I do, you will appreciate that I started with The Sound of music, moved on to the group song of How do you solve a problem like Maria, followed by I have confidence and so on. I only made it to the end of the first half of the movie (So Long, Farewell sung by the children..in my best voices) before Elwira was laughing so hard and begging me to stop because together we were a scary sight, but it worked and we made it to the top in good spirits. At the top the view was spectacular. Wineries in the foreground, the Danube to the left, mountains to the right, and the city of Vienna at dusk in the background. Not bad!

The weather was less then perfect today so we took it a little easier starting with Seegrotte, or the biggest underground lake in Europe. It is an old mine that was flooded after some accidental explosions thus ending its typical use. The neat thing about this place is that during WWII the Nazis had control of it and actually pumped all the water out and used the empty mine as a location for the production of airplane parts. OH and 20 minutes of the 1993 flick The Three Musketeers with Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen and Chris O'Donnel was filmed there. Other then the mine it was a relaxing day of 'just taking Austria in' for me. Now its an early night in my apt. Excellent!