Christmas Eve in Salzburg

Yesterday, the 23rd we took the train from Zurich to Salzburg.  We arrived at 2pm, had a quick late lunch, and then went to a music concert in the Baroque Museum in the Mirabell Castle complex.  We followed that up with an organic, vegetarian Indian dinner and then crashed at our hotel.

This morning was Christmas Eve!  We spent the morning doing some shopping, and got some snowshoes.  We had originally planned to get cross country skiis, but the poor weather (it's raining) and the challenges of transporting skis everywhere on public transit suggested that snowshoes would be the better choice.   I'm sure we'll have pictures of us on snowshoes in a few days when we get to Faistenau!

After lunch we went out to the famous Salzburg Christmas Markets.  I enjoyed this quite a bit - lots of interesting food, drink, spices, nuts, fruits, and other gourmet foods.  And the Christmas decorations were really spectacular.  I took quite a few pictures - some of the better ones are below.  We've been relaxing in our hotel for a couple of hours before heading out for dinner.  Not too many restaurants are open, but there's a Japanese place just down the road that looks good, so we'll try that...  Tomorrow morning we're going to try to attend the Christmas Morning Mass at the Dom.

(Click on the pictures for closer views:)

One small part of the main market, which surrounds the Dom (cathedral)

The Brezel (pretzel) stall

All kinds of tree ornament... I thought the hedgehog was particularly cute.

An angelic choir of identical angels.

There was a skating rink just outside the market, with this costumed angel skating around it handing out treats...

Apricot Schnapps.  Claire is not a fan.

Samiklaus... and Claire surprised in the background

6 Months in Zurich

We've been in Zurich for almost 6 months, hard to believe...  The time has gone quickly - first with getting settled and learning our way around, and then with being very busy at work (for me) and school (for Claire).

Next weekend is Christmas, and we'll be in Salzburg - then staying in a little village near Salzburg to ski for a few days - then on to Munich for some shopping and New Years Eve.  We're looking forward to vacation!

However, despite being very busy we've managed to get out and do something fun almost every week or weekend though.  Not all of these events have been mentioned on the blog, as most of them weren't really exciting, or I didn't take a lot of pictures!

But since we're coming down to the end of the year, I thought I'd do a wrap-up post with a few of those things...

In October, we went to the Jucker Pumpkin Farm - it's a slightly odd but charming attraction, a farm which has turned itself into a weekend outing destination by building huge replicas of "Swiss Cliches" out of ... pumpkins!  And of course they sell pumpkins and squash, at least a dozen kinds, apples, preserves, baking, pumpkin soup, and since this is Switzerland beer and sausages as well.

 

 

Mid-November I went to the Zurich Slow Food festival:

I got the equivalent of a large meal, just wandering around tasting cheese, olive oil, coffee, chocolate, wine, sausage, sake, cured meat, and much, much more.

It was amazing - a huge event, hundreds of vendors, thousands of people.    There were cooking shows (in German) too.

Below is a hand-made, hand-pump espresso machine, not very convenient to use, and not very affordable at 3665 Swiss Francs (just under 4000 dollars...) but it made really, really excellent coffee.

I came home with a shopping bag stuffed with about 40 pounds of food.  Some of it is being sent back to Canada as Christmas gifts...

On December 4th we went to a music concert at the Grossmunster cathedral.  It was Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble, four male voices and a soprano saxophone.  The sax was like a "5th voice" and the style of music was somewhere between medieval choral and free jazz... it worked really well in the echo-ey interior of the cathedral.

We also have visited the Zurich Christmas market, and done a bit of Christmas shopping in and around the main shopping district.  Zurich is beautifully decorated, with lights everywhere and huge Christmas trees.

Bahnhofstrasse, (the main shopping street) late at night after the stores have closed.

Window display of a store selling mostly chocolate & candy

A huge Christmas tree in front of Credit Suisse in Paradeplatz.
The "Occupy / 99%" protesters were here just a few weeks earlier.

And that's it for now.  We've got one week of work left and then we're off to Austria!

Running the Zürich Silvesterlauf

Just a short note tonight! Today Claire and I ran our first race here, the 35th annual Zurich Silversterlauf.

Silverster is "New Years Eve", and "Lauf" is Run.  I know it isn't New Years Eve yet, and I can't explain why they have the run two weeks early.

As usual for Zurich, it was easy and convenient to take the tram from our house to the race start.  Apparently there were about 17,000 people running in different parts of the race (there were different categories and distances).  Our category was very crowded - for the first of the four laps, I was thinking of the Pampelona Running of the Bulls, while Claire was reminded of the Bravo Del Botti race we saw in Montepulciano.At various points around the track we ran under big inflatable arches, and had to negotiate around corners and other obstacles - but mostly it was just other runners all around us.

We did pretty well.  Claire came in about 5 minutes behind the fastest women - a very good time and 12th in her age category!  I managed to beat her by 15 seconds, but that was far behind the fastest men, and I was in something like 190th in my category.  There were 3000 women and 5000 men in the race, so we did ok.