In Austria, looking forward to Prague

Jordan: OK, so just to clear up for everyone, or perhaps just mom, those extra large iced teas we're drinking in the photo of us at the Hofbrauhaus beer hall, just so happen to not be iced teas. We only feel compelled to address this because, mom, we're not sure if you're joking about the whole iced tea thing or not. So just to clear up the murky waters, those iced teas are frothy, eight per cent alcohol, one litre mugs of a little something we like to call DARK LAGER. Very, very tasty.

Now to bring you all up to speed of the goings on in Austria. First we spent a couple days in Salzburg. Needless to say, if you've been there, there isn't a damn thing to do unless you're a Sound of Music fanboy or have a bit of man love for Mozart. Neither Kennedy nor I give two hoots about the Sound of Music, and the only things Mozarty there are his house and birthplace. Have you seen a house before? I thought so. So I'm being a little overly negative here. Salzburg is lovely enough, I guess. We weren't there long, a couple days, and the rain outlasted our own stay.

We thought we'd go up to the top of the hill, as Salzburg is all about the hills, and see the fortress. I knew we had to pay to go in, but I thought we'd be able to check out the grounds for free. I must have forgot, this is a fortress. Nobody gets in or out without paying. We didn't pay. We didn't get in. So we climbed to the top of Salzburg for nothing. But there were some cool views. But that's kinda the thing about Salzburg, everything there plays second fiddle to everything else we've seen. Maybe we're stuck up. Kennedy says "everything else we've seen?" as though she can't believe it. Believe it sister. Check this out, the views from atop the hill, didn't match those of Florence's, the statues aren't as cool as Rome, and Salzburg is a small, beautiful place, but it's got nothing on Luzern.

So in Salzburg we went to Mirabell Gardens, where you guessed it, part of the Sound of Music was shot. We walked right past Mozart's house, and we left Salzburg after crashing the city's soccer team homecoming or something.

On to Vienna. Vienna is a lot like Salzburg only bigger. The cool buildings are bigger, the gardens are bigger, and some of the people are bigger. We checked out the Freud Museum, set up in his Vienna residence/practice. It housed some of the original furniture and was decorated with scores of photos, statuettes, and various other things that littered his office. It was very informative.

Today we roamed through the Schloss Schonbrunn, the royal family's summer palace. It's like a mini, Austrian Versailles. The gardens were enormous and the home to many statues, cool fountains and beautiful flowers. People were also setting up for an orchestral performance of some sort, and one of the rose gardens was cordoned off as a film was being shot.

Other cool sites we took in, in Vienna are the Hofburg Theatre, the Austrian Parliament buildings, which outside of it has a bunch of statues of guys laying knockout punches on their horses, and also the Imperial Palace and St. Stephen's Cathedral.

Going to have a couple drinks for Kennedy's birthday now, and then we're off to Prague in the morning.