ITALY and AUSTRIA

So many people come to Florence to see the beautiful church, the Duomo. We were able to experience the true beauty of this church from the inside when we celebrated mass with a handful of locals and nuns at 7:30am!
We took a very long walk along this river in Florence and just enjoyed the backdrop that it is set against.
Padua. Not a great deal to do in this small Italian college city, but with a bottle of wine, a park bench, and a guide book to Europe (Padua wasn't in the guide book mind you) do you need much more?
This is the view from our hostel window in Salzburg, Austria--hard to ever want to leave--but amazingly enough the rest of the city has equally beautiful view points.
David's never been happier than he was at this very moment in his life! Pork shoulder, a stein of Austrian beer, and a view of the city at night (oh and just in case you don't have the full effect yet, add church bells booming up at us on each quarter hour as well).
Is that a VonTrapp child from the Sound of Music movie or is it Liz? This is the park where the Do-Re-Mi song was filmed and the kids were running around singing--so naturally what did we need to do here? Run around singing! Ok, maybe David didn't totally give a 100% performance, but we got a little singing from him.


Well we did it—we made it through 3 countries, 4 cities—we traveled on 7 trains, 2 buses, and an airplane and we had a marvelous time!

With no agenda except to enjoy other cultures and places we had never been, we left Hamburg on Sunday morning (glad to leave the rain and the clouds behind)!

Our first stop was to Florence, Italy which was beautiful and crowded. We loved the wine and the Duomo (a great church in the heart of the city). We then set out to Padova (Padua—which we only knew of thanks to Shakespeare). We didn’t know what we would find but after tourist-ville in Florence we were ready to try our hand at “unknown Italy” and it was unknown! There was not another person in the whole city speaking English and it was so neat!

Next on our trip was Salzburg, Austria and this is where we left our hearts! Beer, castles, churches, convents, and the rolling hills that are alive with the “Sound of Music” this city swept us away to a place we did not know existed.

In Salzburg we stayed in a hostel on the mountain top (a true blessing which we were very lucky to be given) it was a place that people hiked to the top of for a view point of the ENTIRE city, and it was the view from our hostel room.

We had planned to move onto Vienna before coming back to Hamburg, but we were just too enamored so we stayed in Salzburg with hopes of visiting Vienna at a later time. So we got on a train through Munich and came to find our new home.

Once we got back to Hamburg we picked up our keys and walked around Alsterdorf (the Neighborhood where we will live while we are here) for 2 hours looking for our apartment—and when we found it we were so excited because—it is PERFECT! The apartment has beautiful dark wood furniture and high ceilings.

We have a grocery store around the corner to walk to, a bus stop across the street to get downtown, and an underground station a short 10 minutes walk to go anywhere in the city. This morning (Saturday) we walked to the neighborhood market that they have each weekend where many people come to sell their meats, cheese, flowers, and fresh fruits and vegetables—we are stocked for the week and we didn’t even make ourselves look too bad asking for our items in German and in Kilograms.

We are feeling so lucky and so excited to be here at this moment in our lives and we will keep you posted on how things go in our first week of real life routines.