We were wholly unprepared for our first full day of sightseeing; I forgot to pack my ballgown and Bob had forgotten his beer-wench uniform.
I should have also brushed up on my Middle Age buildings history. Apparently, if you were at the very top of the royal ladder, you got to live in a schloss (“castle”). Think the Schonbrunn or Hofburg Palaces of an earlier post. However, if you were not at the top but just below or on a middle rung, you were relegated to a burg (“castle”). Just doesn’t have that same wow factor does it? Burg. I live in a Burg. I think it was intentional.
Case in point. Compare the Viennese palaces with the Burg Forchenstein.
I felt for those dukes and earls that had to live out in the su”burg”s. All they had for views from the windows were open blue sky and soft gently rolling hills. No frenetic hustle and bustle of big city.
The burgs only had hundreds of rooms and not a thousand. Poor guys. Life must have been rough. Only a foot bridge (not even retracting!), a moat, a couple of cannons and spears and some forest to keep those barbarians at bay.
Sarcasm aside, visiting a real-life castle was incredible. Probably would have been better had I not forgotten the ballgown though.
Incidentally, we were in Burgenland, or as can already be deduced, the “land of the castles”. The narrow State, in the far east of Austria, is bordered by Hungary (East), Slovenia (South), and Slovakia (North) and is considered the wine basket/jug of the country.
Next stop. The quaint, cobble-stoned town of Rust (pronounced “roost”).
The grubby hands of modern advertising had even crept out into this bucolic countryside. The ad reads something about banking or mines or banking mines or mine banking. I don’t remember.
One of the peculiar things about the town is found on the rooftops of many buildings. Every year, like clockwork, storks come back to Rust to roost (badum-ching). Even more brilliant, the German word for stork is storch, pronounced “stork”. And you thought you weren’t bilingual! We were there in the fall so the storchs were already sunning themselves down in the French Riviera. That would have been a sight to behold.
Last stop. The Dorfmuseum. To be completely honest, my recollection of the Dorfmuseum is a little fuzzy. The Austrians love their beer (and other libations) and they like to share that love, especially at meals. I am surprised that the lightweight in me was able to take such clear and steady pictures.
If I remember correctly, the museum was dedicated to highlighting what life was like in this part of the country during the turn of the 20th century. What surprised me the most and still stands out in my mind was how small and compact everything was. That might explain why I can not automatically disassociate the word “dorf” with “dwarf” (the beer probably didn’t help things either). Dorf, I found out later, is the German word for “village”. Whoops.
