Two-day trip to Austria

Thursday morning my DH and I left for a two-day trip to Graz, the main city of Styria, Austria's South-Eastern province. It's a small quaint city and its old part of town is part of the World Cultural Heritage. I am actually a PhD student there, although I'm hardly ever in Graz. Fortunately I can work on my PhD here in Germany. But now I had to arrange some burocratic things, so we turned it into a trip. But these official duties took only about 20 minutes which left us lots of time to enjoy the city.
The weather on Thursday was beautiful. So we decided to hike up the castle hill and visit the Bell Tower and the Clock Tower. We also spent some time on the terrasse of a small café up on the hillside with a beautiful view of the city. We stayed up there until sunset and enjoyed watching the city with all the Christmas lights on. Then my DH and I strolled through the Christmas markets and looked for some Styrian food for dinner. Styria is especially famous for pumpkin seed oil btw.


The next day we visited the world's largest collection of old weapons. It was really interesting. The most amazing was a jousting armor for - a horse!

Mini-moon

I thought I'd share some more pictures. A week after our wedding we left for a weekend get-away to Leipzig as a mini-honeymoon (or as our friend called it a "mini-moon"). We spent three days in Leipzig which is situated in the Eastern part of Germany (which was the GDR until 1990).
My DH's father was born there as was my grandma, so there is quite some family history attached to that city. Fortunately the weather was great. We spend hours walking around different parts of Leipzig and sitting in nice little pubs. Some of the sights we did include the Thomaskirche (the church were Johann Sebastian Bach, the composer, worked and is buried), Nicolaikirche (where they had the important and famous prayer meetings connected with the Monday demonstrations which led to the downfall of communism in the GDR), the Stasi museum (Stasi was the secret service in the FDR spying on the citizens), the German Administrative Court and the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (a monument commemorating the battle at Leipzig which the Allies won against the invading French emperor Napoleon I in 1813).