Vienna, Salzburg and Cake

My neat and tidy Stillman & Birn holiday memory sketchbook is still an ongoing project, this time featuring trips to Vienna, Salzburg and cake! 

If I could chose a city I'd love to live in then it would be Vienna! Having said that it's probably better for my disappearing waistline that I don't live there the food and more specifically the desserts and cakes are every foodies dream. 

Let's take a little mosey, 

Most memorable of my trips to Austria and Vienna was one where we stayed in the Hotel Sacher, like stepping into a time machine and getting out in the Victorian age. The blue bar saw us sitting on a round, plump, blue velvet sofa sipping delicious Cosmopolitans and watching the opera fans popping in for a glass of champers after the performance. I loved seeing the elderly ladies, elegant and glittering with diamonds talking with that special Viennese accent. Breakfast was amazing with lashings of the famous Sacher Torte and whipped cream (yes, for breakfast!). Leaving the hotel to walk off all those calories was also great with tourists taking photos of you because you might be famous, so many sights to see, like the beautiful Hofburg palace featured in my sketch. You feel the influence of art, music and theatre everywhere, I even eavesdropped on a conversation about a new theatre production with the working title '' Four Jewish Menopauses'', yes, seriously! 

The Kunst Historischen Museum is fabulous with frescoes painted by Klimt (the Egyptian figure bottom right), however the highlight here was seeing Hans Holbein's Jane Seymour, I felt like I was meeting her face to face. Lots of walking and then cake, Yey! Pop into Café Anna Demel for a piece of stupendous Anna Torte accompanied by an aromatic Anna Demel coffee, flavoured with orange liqueur. The Cafés are famous and often spectacular in Vienna anyway but again the ambiance of Demel is just amazing. 

Salzburg is gorgeous too, I spent my honeymoon there and so enjoyed the lovely little streets, you do get the feeling however that Mozart's mum must have been carried from house to house during his birth, I swear I saw at least 3 houses that claimed to be Mozart's birth house. Without being vulgar, his balls are everywhere too ....... delicious pralines called ''Mozart Kugeln'' ( Mozart Balls) are a popular souvenir. You see what I mean, you can't escape from sweets and chocolate even if you wanted to! 

And to finish off; the bed! We often went to a wonderful spa hotel in Zell am See, I swear I have never slept in a bed that was soooooo comfortable, so it deserves a place in my sketch too, I once read a write up in cosmo about the hotel, the author swore that the bed was the best she'd ever slept in too! Another thing that the hotel was famous for was its dessert buffet on Saturday evenings, metres and metres of Austrian dessert specialities, as far as the eye could see! Heaven........... until you step on the scales!