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- Written by Tom Snow
Salzburg is a small city in Austria, the capital of a state also named Salzburg. At just over 100,000 inhabitants it's on a similar scale to Luxembourg City. It's mostly famous for being the home town of the legendary composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and more recently for a classic movie that was filmed there, "The Sound of Music." I have little interest in either of these things, though, so I'd wager this travelogue has fewer mentions of Mozart or the Von Trapps than any other about this city you're likely to read.
Read more: Salzburg Part 1 - Mirabell Palace and Stiegl Brewery
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- Written by Tom Snow
I'm almost done putting together a blog about my weekend in Salzburg, Austria, but before I put that up, I have to say a few words and share a few pictures from a day trip I took a week later to an out-of-the way spot in the northwestern tip of Bavaria. This place is called Kloster Kreuzberg and is in the Rhön mountains. It's not only a monastery (Kloster) but also has a big restaurant, some quaint-looking inns, hiking trails, and a brewery. Apparently the beer made in this brewery got some recognition from a 1987 Playboy article naming it the best beer in the world. So someone was reading the articles after all! Now, up to this point, I'd only ever heard the epithet "best beer in the world" applied to the Belgian Trappist ale Westvleteren 12, so if there was a rival claimant to this title, I had to taste it for myself.
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- Written by Tom Snow
Before I relive the recent weekend I spent in Hamburg, I have to discuss something that non-Europeans, especially Americans, overlook about Germany: it may be a lot smaller than the United States, but it's more culturally diverse. I recently found a great listicle on the Chive, one of those light entertainment sites I use for after-work unwinding, about what Hollywood gets wrong about people's countries. In this list I found a picture of a woman decked out in Dirndl standing next to a Warsteiner beer tap, captioned "Bavaria is not our whole country." That's so true.
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- Written by Tom Snow
Strasbourg (German Straßburg) is a French city on the German border, on the west bank of the Rhine, and that location is probably responsible for its conflict-ridden history. It's the largest city in a region called Alsace (German Elsass) which for much of the past was desirable to whichever side didn't have it. The city was traditionally German until 1681 when the French took it, then the Germans took it and all Alsace back in 1871, which caused the French to seethe in resentment until they wrested it back in the First World War. Aside from the relatively brief Nazi occupation in the Second World War, it's been French ever since.
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