Sophie & Ollie´s Travels

Greetings from Graz. We have been in Graz for four days now but will move on to Klagenfurt tomorrow before we return to Graz later on so I will let you know what we have been up to before I forget.

Graz is a beautiful city. It has a population of 250,000 and is surrounded by hills with woods on them and church spires poking up out of the bare trees and cute A-frame wooden houses sitting at the base of the hill looking exactly like an Austrian hillside should.

We have been staying with a relative of Ollie's called Renate in the suburbs of Graz. She has been taking us to see the sights and has been looking after us very well.

On our first day in Graz, Renate took us into the city to the Farmer's Market. Here the farmers sell fruit and vegetables, tons of Christmas stuff such as candle holders, door wreaths, baubles, candles etc, and weird blocks of something from which mushrooms grow.

We walked around the Old Town with its Medieval buildings built around cobblestone courtyards, a great stone double staircase which intertwines two sets of stairs together built in 1500ish. We visited a ridiculously Baroque church with gold everything, different coloured dark woods, different coloured marbles and paintings.

We also walked to a field where a shallow pool has been built that will freeze and become an outdoor skating rink. A slope has also been constructed and snow brought in for people to go down on sitting on inflatable sleds. Very 'cool', lame, but we need to wait until it is even colder before we can use these.

Renate took us to see one of the city's main attractions, the Schlossberg. The Schlossberg is a medieval fortress on top of a hill right in the middle of Graz. A bell tower and a clock tower are its main features now. The clock tower it a giant T-shape with what looks like a Swiss chalet at its top complete with windows and pitched roof.

To get up to the fortress you must climb 260 steps but you can look over the red-tiled pitched roofs which have UNESCO heritage protection and the River Mur that runs through the city. Thankfully, you can take the lift through the middle of the hill back down.

In the evening Renate took us to see the house where Ollie's grandma now living in Australia grew up. Everything here has so much obvious history and Renate has lived here her whole life so she tells us interesting stories about the area as it was before.

On Sunday we had a lazy day inside but went out to a Chinese buffet restaurant in the afternoon. It is good to have decent Asian food again, especially sushi which you can't get anywhere so far, not even much in England. I miss New Zealand's Asian food, it is so cheap and good compared to Europe's offerings.

In the evening we went to meet Renate's two sisters and brother at one of their houses. We drank nice Austrian red wine, unlike the vinegar we had in Greece, with Lukas, who Ollie has met before. Everyone speaks at least a bit of English, usually much more than they say, and we tried out some of our very basic German so we had a nice evening talking to them all.

The next day Renate took us to an old mansion/palace which again looked very Austrian. Hills with brown trees and fallen leaves sit at the back of the house, the grassy park had sculptures, trees and peacocks scattered about and the house was a huge, four-storey symmetrical block painted in yellows and white with shuttered windows. In the centre of the building is a big courtyard which you can look down into from the many corridors inside the palace. It looked like a Romeo and Juliet set.

For lunch we tried a Styrian cuisine, Styria is a region of Austria that Graz is in. We had a kind of corn mash with bacon fat, Ol did not like it but I thought the corn mash on its own was ok. We also tried apple punsch this time - much nicer than orange punsch - it tasted like hot apple cider.

In the afternoon we saw Graz's famous armoury. The museum has a huge collection of Medieval weaponry and armour. It is a bit of a boy thing and Ollie enjoyed it but as we were the only ones on the English tour I felt forced to listen to the guide and actually found it quite interesting. We saw bullet damaged armour, tried on a proper knight's helmet, saw the damage from a morning star on a definitely dead guy's helmet. We saw a 15 million Euro full horse armour set and one of only four surviving knight's boxes. The Austrian Queen Maria Theresa thought it too rude the knights exaggerating their manhood with their box so ordered them all destroyed. The things you can learn in Austrian armourys.

On our last day in Graz, for the time being, we had a look in a mall and a tour round Ikea before taking a walk in the woods. We walked for an hour on an ocean of fallen autumn leaves among bare trees overlooking the city.

Our next stop is Klagenfurt, near the Slovenian and Italian border, to stay with another of Ollie's relatives Wolfgang.

From
Ollie and Sophie.

P.s. Graz is not as cold as Vienna but apparently it gets much colder here...