Blogs from Melk, Lower Austria, Austria, Europe - page 4

Starting later than usual, we took buses to Stift Melk (Melk Abbey), one of the great buildings of magnificent Baroque architecture. (Melk Castle 976, Monastery 1089, Baroque building 1736) We were driven to the top of the cliff, favoured location of churches and castles here. Walking through a construction site restoring the site, we assembled in the second courtyard. The guide (a young woman, very proud of Melk) gave us some history as we moved into the museum, once the guest rooms of the imperial palace of the Hapsburgs. The resemblance to the design of the Turn and Taxis palace was evident, and both of them made me think of the novels in which characters leave their rooms for someone else’s after dark – long corridors with many identical doors. The museum was well-desig... read more

Geo: 48.2271, 15.3296Breakfast - today, they served a warm cream cheese strudel topped with raisins. Most likely, it was leftover dessert from yesterday, from the guest house's restaurant. It was soggy and probably microwaved; it was decent but might have been very good had it been fresh. They had some really good plain buns; I cut back on the meat and cheese today and instead went pretty hard on the homemade preserves. There were also some good poppyseed buns, but they were pretty bad with the preserves - I didn't notice until too late, but there was tons of salt sprinkled on them. Everybody in Hallstatt must have high blood pressure with the amount of salt they ingest!On the boat to the train station - somebody finally guessed that I'm Chinese, and not Korean or Japanese! ... read more