At any rate, during this latest go-through, I found these pictures and am not sure if I ever included them. If you've seen one before, just continue on.
I liked this memorial in the Klingenbach cemetery.
This is a similar memorial in the Siegendorf cemetery.
I was told this is a memorial to early Christian era Roman graves in Klingenbach.
In other blogs I showed the bare May Day poles put up by the two political parties in Austria. We saw this one near Salzburg. I couldn't decide if it looks like a Christmas tree or a hoop skirt cage.
Bob and I visited Burg Forchtenstein in summer 2009; I covered that visit in blogs 37-39. When Kate and Colin were in Europe last spring, we went there again and took a few pictures we missed the other time. This is the records room that adjourns the locked and guarded treasure room. For several centuries they kept a record of everything in three languages - German, Latin and Hungarian. No typing back then - imagine being one of the clerks who had the privilege of transcribing every little event that took place during the day.
These are some of the ivory treasures in the room. You can see more of the records on shelves behind them.
They have paintings and objects of gold and silver displayed in other rooms. Apparently, ivory was considered more precious than gold.
The work is quite intricate.
Wabi Beauty Center is located a couple of miles inside Hungary from the border at Klingenbach. We got our mani-pedis here, but you can get just about anything here - from manicures, pedicures, hair styling and dyeing, massages, waxing, and plastic sugery (plastiche chirurgie) where they do everything you can find in America. On the top floor is a hotel where you can be pampered while you recover.
You can see how big the facility is, and the parking lot was almost always full. They're open almost every day of the year.
You see these wind farms all over the place, and most of the time less than half of them are working.
I was delighted to find this picture since photography is banned at the site. This is a chamber in the catacombs of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna (built beginning in 1147) that contains the skeletons of 600 victims of the Black Death. They were found in the 1700s when the strong smells wafting up into the cathedral drove the king to force prisoners to exhume every body buried under the church and "clean" the bones (sounds really disgusting huh?). Sure make you sorry if that was the year you decided to steal a loaf of bread from a market stall.
I find this picture quite haunting. It's the centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Eisenstadt. We never knew it was there since you can't see it from the street. When Bob was in the hospital, he saw the cemetery from a second floor window down the hall from his room (he spent a lot of time walking the halls "checking things out"). There was once a thriving Jewish population in Eisenstadt, but the Nazis ended that. Today there are only two Jews living in the town.
I thought the snow made the old tombstones look particularly ghostly.
I never forgot that Klingenbach is a rural village. I never lived in the country before, it was quite novel for me to see a tractor or some other farm equipment going through the village. Coming from the sub-tropical area of Houston, I don't get to see the kind of crops they grow in Austria.
This is a pfirsichbaum, or peach tree.
an apfelbaum, or apple tree ...
which has lost a bunch of its ripe apfels ...
a birnbaum, or pear tree ...
a marillen obstgarten, or apricot orchard, at the edge of the village ...
Harvested nuts drying ...
weintraube, or grapes, in the vinyard ...
mais, or corn, taller than me ...
weizen, or wheat, growing just outside the village on a hilly slope ...
These pics are farming equipment that Ljuba showed us in the barn at her family compound.
We never saw any livestock in our area, other than a few chickens that villagers rasied in coops. I will say that there are a few roosters that are lucky two crazed Texans didn't come after them after more than one dawn display of crowing. So we settled for sheep - our style. Bob loved these little guys.
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